Legal Intelligencer / Law.com article by: Aleeza Furman

June 25, 2025

What You Need to Know

• The Pennsylvania Supreme Court granted significantly more allocatur petitions in 2024 than in years past.
• Attorneys said that in recent years the high court has expanded the kinds of cases it takes up on appeal.
• Some lawyers said the increase is likely to prompt more litigants to pursue high court appeals.

Only a tiny fraction of appeals in Pennsylvania ever make it to the state’s highest court.

But that tiny fraction might be growing.

Last year, the number of cases the Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed to examine spiked dramatically. In fact, when it comes to appeals from the Superior Court, the justices granted more allocatur petitions in 2024 than they had in any of the 15 years preceding it.

And appellate attorneys say they’re glad to see the increase.

“The higher numbers indicate that this court is willing to address a broad range of legal issues, “Maureen McBride, chair of Lamb McErlane’s appellate department, said. “And that’s obviously good for litigants and the public.”

According to data from the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts, the justices granted 78 petitions for allowance of appeal from Superior Court rulings in 2024. That’s the most Superior Court allocatur petitions the justices have granted in a given year since at least 2009, by a comfortable margin. Between 2009 and 2023, that number never breached 60.

And last year’s spike was not a simple function of more petitions filed. The number of allocatur petitions before the high court was actually on the low end compared to years past.

While the number of granted appeals continues to reflect only a small percentage of the total petitions the Supreme Court reviews, that percentage nonetheless jumped in 2024. In the years from 2009 and 2023, the Supreme Court typically granted around 2% of allocatur petitions from Superior Court rulings. But in 2024, the justices were twice as likely to take up a case, granting more than 4% of allocatur petitions arising from Superior Court rulings.

The AOPC’s immediately available data on allocatur petitions out of the Commonwealth Court was limited to the last five years, but those numbers suggest that the increase in granted appeals was not only specific to the Superior Court. According to the AOPC data, the Supreme Court granted 54allocatur petitions on Commonwealth Court rulings in 2024 and 56 in 2023, while in the three years before that the number of granted petitions topped out at 40.

Why the Increase?

There could be a few reasons why allocator grants are up, Lamb McErlane’s McBride said. One factor, she posited, could be that the justices want to explore more areas of law where they see room for further development.

“In recent years, the court has been willing to grant allocatur in a wider array of cases,” McBride said. “It also seems more willing to delve into relatively obscure areas of the law.”

McBride and other attorneys observed that in recent years the justices have taken up several matters dealing with longstanding case law that had not been reviewed by the high court in sometime. At the same time, the justices also seem to have expanded the kinds of rulings that they have been examining.

A decade ago, allocatur petitions out of the Superior Court usually only caught the justices ‘interest if there was something especially noteworthy about the ruling being challenged, according to David Senoff, founding member of First Law Strategy Group. Senoff recalled that the cases the Supreme Court used to focus on typically involved novel issues or sharply divided en banc rulings.

More recently, Senoff said, the high court seems more open to examining opinions from three-judge panels if those cases pose questions the justices consider worth exploring.

“They’re taking cases that present discrete issues that they can then provide guidance for both the trial courts and the Superior Courts, [such as] evidentiary issues or jury instructions,” Senoff said.

However, Senoff suggested, the more cases appealed may not equate to more questions reviewed overall. Instead, he contended, the Supreme Court appears to be increasingly granting allocatur on only a select few questions the petitioner raised on appeal, rather than all the issues raised.

“Previously, my recollection is, if you were the petitioner and you won, and you didn’t have an outrageous number of issues … they were going to take all of them,” Senoff said. “Now, when you win as the petitioner, it’s not a foregone conclusion that every single issue that gets raised is going to be accepted.”

Robert Palumbos, chair of Duane Morris’ appellate department, suggested that the shift in the way the justices have been approaching allocatur petitions may reflect changes in the Supreme Court’s operation under Chief Justice Debra Todd, who took over as the head of the court in 2022. Palumbos also noted that the makeup of the court has been fairly stable for the past decade, with five of the seven justices having served together on the bench since 2016. Over the course of that period, Palumbos said, “There just might be issues that have developed, or they have been looking to take, as their time working together progresses.”

Palumbos said the increase in granted petitions is a good sign for litigants who want to pursue their cases beyond the intermediate appellate courts. “It should make litigants a little bit more aggressive in seeking review and thinking about the types of cases that the court might be interested in,” he said.

McBride, too, said she expected litigants would be more willing to pursue a Supreme Court appeal if they knew their odds of success were better.

“Litigants may also be more inclined to frame the issues early on in a way that identifies them as issues of statewide importance and to make sure that issues are properly preserved,” McBride said. “It can also influence settlement negotiations if all parties recognize that an allocatur grant is a real possibility.”

Senoff, conversely, asserted that the uptick in granted allocatur petitions does not alter the fact that the vast majority of civil cases are resolved at the Superior Court level. He contended that the increase in successful petitions is not significant enough to fundamentally alter his evaluation of a case.

“It’s hard for me to say that it’s a seismic shift,” Senoff said, “but it certainly represents a change for the better.”

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