Insurance companies are the litigation champions confronting an average of 1,696 lawsuits, spanning from product liability and environmental class actions to directors and officers claims, and even coverage fights over hurricanes and terrorist attacks, according to a new survey of corporate litigation trends from international law firm Fulbright Jaworski LLP.

In its third annual survey of corporate litigation trends - pulling data from 422 in-house law departments worldwide - Fulbright found that US companies face an average of 305 pending lawsuits internationally. For large US companies - those with $1 billion or more in annual gross revenue - the number of lawsuits soared to 556 cases, with an average of 50 new disputes emerging each year for close to half of them.

Although the majority of those cases are in US courts, the tide of international disputes is rising - more than one-third of companies said that up to 20 percent of their dockets originate in foreign venues, proof that USstyle litigation is going global.

UK-based companies surveyed by Fulbright reported an average of only 178 cases - 63 in the US.