For Uncle Sam’s lawyers, 2013 was a relatively good year. The federal government spent about half as much to resolve lawsuits as it did during 2012, doling out $1.7 billion from the Judgment Fund — an open-ended account that the Treasury Department uses to pay legal judgments and settlements.

In 2012, by contrast, the feds spent about $4 billion on lawsuits and in 2011 just more than $3 billion, a National Law Journal review of thousands of records in the fund’s database shows.