How Many Times Can a Complaint Be Amended?

This post aims to answer a simple question: what is the highest number of amendments to a complaint that has ever been allowed by a court in the United States?

A bit of background first. This post concerns civil litigation, where plaintiffs typically file a complaint setting forth various causes of action against defendants who have allegedly wronged them. These complaints are often amended. Sometimes plaintiffs add or remove parties. Plaintiffs may also add or remove causes of action or factual allegations in support of their causes of action. A defendant may move to dismiss a complaint, and if they succeed, the court may grant the plaintiff leave to file an amended complaint. Granting leave to amend at least once is common--unless a defendant has clearly demonstrated that a plaintiff's case is completely futile, a court will likely give the plaintiff another shot.

While many cases I've litigated have involved amended, second amended, or even fourth amended complaints, I was curious about the maximum number of amendments courts have allowed. A first amended complaint isn't too hard for a plaintiff to get. But when a court is confronted with a complaint that has been drafted and redrafted multiple times, the probability that the court will give a plaintiff yet another chance decreases.

From my exhaustive research (searching for "tenth amended complaint" and increasing the numbers until I could find no further results), it appears that the most amended complaint on record was amended twenty-two times.  The case is Mirarchi v. Boockvar, and it's a recent one--with the original complaint filed on January 12, 2021 in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (case no. 5:21-CV-00126). A publicly-accessible link to the docket is here.

I've answered the question I set out to investigate, but I dug into the case itself, as I was curious about what would give rise to so many amendments. For those of you brave enough to dive into that nonsense, read on:

The original complaint can be viewed here. It's one of the numerous lawsuits filed in the wake of the 2020 presidential election that alleged the election had been stolen as a result of massive voter fraud. Mirarchi's allegations start off as readable, but quickly veer off on a tangent in which he claims that the total number of votes that Biden received was "interconnected" with "the Golden Ratio Squared, 2.61803399, and a Reconstruction Cost Value, 601118," which had allegedly been used against Mirarchi in a separate litigation matter involving building appraisal numbers (which appears to be this case). From there, things only get more complicated, as Mirarchi claims that calculations using these numbers end up equaling Biden's total number of votes, thereby revealing fraud.

For example, here's one of the paragraphs:

Here's another:

Mirarchi wraps up these mathematical allegations with a reference to widely and repeatedly discredited allegations by Sidney Powell which she now argues no reasonable person would believe as she tries to escape liability in a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems. Mirarchi's causes of action include election fraud, treason, RICO, and a 42 USC § 1983 claim for violation of his constitutional rights.

The circumstances behind the amendments to this complaint are unclear. For several weeks in January and February 2021, Mirarchi filed further amended versions of his complaint on a near-daily basis, culminating in a Twenty-First Amended Complaint that was filed on February 12, 2021. At that point the court ordered Mirarchi to combine his allegations into a Final Amended Complaint, after which no further amendments would be permitted. The Plaintiff filed that Final Amended Complaint (the twenty-second amended complaint, and the twenty-third iteration of the document) on March 3, 2021.

A motion to dismiss was filed by several of the county defendants on April 26, 2021. The Court has ordered other defendants to respond by May 26 and has granted leave for federal defendants to respond by July 16, 2021. Accordingly, it may be some time before we see whether a Twenty-Third Amended Complaint ends up getting filed.