To illustrate this argument, I draw on two case studies: the closed factories labor movement and the anti-eviction movement, which together involved nearly 700 lawsuits in Taiwan from 1996 to 2015. In both cases, state-initiated, plaintiff-driven litigation greatly shaped the strategies available to social movement organizers, ultimately producing different outcomes: the closed factories labor movement failed, while the anti-eviction movement succeeded. Utilizing archives and government documents, I show that for bureaucrats, what mattered was not the costs and benefits of litigation per se, but how the process enabled them to evade accountability. In the anti-eviction movement, the government even viewed “filing lawsuits against citizens” as the “Standard Operating Procedure” for executive departments to manage land and property controversies. This study has broad implications for judicial politics and state–society relations.