There were 18 federal civil lawsuits filed/docketed in district court on New Year’s Day. They are the first of around 200 civil district court cases that will be assigned docket number “21-cv-00001.”

There are at least 180 ‘number ones’ so far this year

The New Year’s Day lawsuits include

-4 related to alleged employment discrimination
-3 personal injury suits,
-3 intellectual property disputes
-2 suits under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and….

A social security suit, an ADA suit, a consumer fraud suit, a habeas petition, a motion to enforce an arbitration award, and finally…

A petition (writ of mandamus) asking a federal district court to order the SEC to amend its recently filed complaint against Ripple alleging the company sold $1.38 billion in unregistered securities when it sold over 14.6 billion units of its cryptocurrency XRP…

If you’ve surfed PACER, you probably know that “cv’ refers to the civil docket. There are more cases designated with docket number “21-cv-00001” than there are federal district courts because some federal districts comprise several divisions, and each keeps its own count.

There is some variation across courts, but the core elements of a federal district court docket number are the same. A docket number is part of a much larger data set collected by clerks.
Here’s how the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida shows its system

The core data elements captured for civil filings today were first rolled-out over thirty years ago. The data compiled about each court’s caseload and the nature/disposition of cases informs important decisions—including, among other things, whether new judgeships are necessary.

from the 2020 year-end report:

There were 470,581 civil case filed—a 58% increase compared to 2019, which saw 297,877 civil case filed. BUT the jump is due to the more than 202,000 lawsuits alleging that 3M earplugs issued to U.S. soldiers caused hearing loss.