Drawing on the experience of the European working group for the comparative study of litigation patterns, the author assesses the possibilities and limits of longitudinal international comparisons. The major challenge is ensuring that what is compared is comparable. Overall national litigation data are not comparable as such; official statistics raise more questions than they answer. The problems lie in the (socio)legal categories used in various countries, consistency of registration over time, and differences in legal procedures. The author suggests that a more fruitful line of inquiry begins with sociolegal categories of problems (e.g., housing, debt) and searches for litigation patterns. Thus disaggregating litigation data has the additional advantage of allowing the use of problem-specific baselines, which makes for greater comparability of data.