Background Defensive medicine is physicians’ deviation from standard medical care which is primarily intended either to reduce or avoid medico legal litigation. Although the Federal Ethics Committee review in Ethiopia has shown that applications for medical/surgical error investigation claims are increasing at an alarming rate, there is no study to date done to estimate the degree of defensive practice done by the physicians with an intention of avoiding this increasing legal claim. This study assessed the practice of defensive medicine among (...) highly litigious disciplines (surgery) and described factors associated with its practice. Methods Cross sectional quantitative study using online survey questionnaires was conducted to assess the degree of defensive practice and six factors (age, years of experience, specialty, monthly income, place of practice and previous medico legal history) associated with its practice were assessed among surgeons working in Ethiopia. Results A total of 430 surgeons directly received an online survey questionnaire and 236 of them successfully completed the questionnaire making the response rate 51.2%. Nearly half of the study participants (51.7%) were aware of the concept of defensive medicine and 174 (74%) reported performing one form of defensive practice. Twenty-nine (12.3%) of the participants have legal dispute history, though only 1.3% of them ended up in penalty. Avoiding high risk procedures was the commonest defensive act performed by 60% of the participants, followed by ordering tests unnecessarily (52.1%). Multinomial logistic regression model showed that there was no association between age of the participant, place of practice, year of experience and defensive practice. This model also showed that cardiothoracic and vascular surgeons perform less defensively than surgeons with other specialty with P value of 0.02. Conclusion The practice of defensive medicine is widespread among surveyed Ethiopian surgeons and further studies are required to objectively estimate the effect of defensive practice on the health care system of the country. Policy makers need to develop strategy towards decreasing this high rate of defensive practice. (shrink)