commercial lawsuit funding

How to Choose A Litigation Funder

Marla Decker

It’s 2019, and litigation finance is going to play prominently in the legal industry this year. Lawyers and claimholders increasingly desire the utility and flexibility of what litigation finance can offer. As demand for litigation funding has increased, so too has the number of litigation funders in the market. Some funders (like Lake Whillans) focus exclusively on litigation financing, while others have added litigation finance investments as part of a larger investment portfolio. The field has matured to the point that Chambers & Partners ranked litigation funders in the U.S. and U.K. last year. (Lake Whillans as a firm, and Lake Whillans co-founder Boaz Weinstein individually, each were ranked among the top bands in the 2018 Chambers rankings).

So if you are a claimholder, a lawyer seeking funding for your client or firm, or law firm management trying to differentiate between funders, how should you be analyzing the options? We suggest there are key differences among funders that you can use to compare:

Turning the Law Department Into a Profit Center

Lee Drucker

Perhaps the biggest trend in corporate law departments over the past few years has been the rise of the legal ops function. Ten years ago there were only a handful of law department operations professionals (LDOs), typically only in large sophisticated organizations. Today, about a third of the Fortune 500 law departments have at least one professional in such a role. All these professionals have one thing in common: their job is to bring business discipline to the legal function.

How Litigation Finance Can End the Partisan Practice of Law

Marla Decker

No, I’m not talking about politics. I’m talking about a different partisan divide: the division in the legal-services market between so-called “Plaintiffs’ Firms” and “Defense Firms” and how litigation finance can mitigate the division.

Acceleration Bay Work Product Decision

Garrett Ordower

The latest work product decision in the litigation finance sphere — Acceleration Bay v. Activision Blizzard — bucks the near universal trend of courts finding that the work product doctrine shields disclosure of communications exchanged with an actual or prospective litigation funder. Probably because it used the wrong legal standard.

Update: Rules Governing Disclosure of Litigation Finance

Garrett Ordower

The U.S. Court’s Advisory Committee on Civil Rules signaled in its recently released report that litigation finance continues “growing and evolving” and that considering potential rules mandating disclosure of funding arrangements must begin “if at all, by undertaking a careful quest for information that may be hard to come by.” That process will not proceed…

Litigation Finance Evangelism

Lee Drucker

If you have been looking for a niche that will help you attract new business from inside and outside your firm, one of the most promising areas is litigation funding. A wide range of lawyers in your firm need to be able to navigate litigation funding: transactional lawyers need to advise clients on the finance aspects of major litigation; litigators must advise clients who are considering potential claims of the various financing options available to them; and law firm leaders routinely evaluate the security and profitability of the firm’s fee arrangements with clients. Expertise in litigation funding has become a core competence. Being an expert in litigation funding used to be a competitive advantage. http://www.newellis.com/PDFs/2017/NewEllis-030617.pdf. But with the increased availability and acceptance of litigation funding, lawyers’ having experience with litigation funding– and funders—is a necessity and any firm lacking in this area will be at a distinct disadvantage.

Litigation Finance: Work Product & Discovery in the Wake of Gharabe v. Chevron

Garrett Ordower

The closely watched case of Gbarabe v. Chevron – a class action against the oil giant based on an oil rig explosion off the coast of Nigeria – has been portrayed as a cautionary tale for the world of litigation finance. The defense attorneys’ dogged pursuit of the details of plaintiff’s outside funding, the story goes, succeeded, and aided in the attack on the adequacy of plaintiff’s counsel. The defense did successfully defeat class certification, but litigation funding ultimately played little or no role in the case’s demise.

Draft Report of the International Council for Commercial Arbitration on Third-Party Funding: What You Need Know

Marla Decker

The Draft Report of the International Council for Commercial Arbitration and the Queen Mary University of London Task Force on Third-Party Funding in International Arbitration: What You Need to Know

The international arbitration community has been a leader in the adoption and evolution of third-party funding. Continuing that trend, The International Council for Commercial Arbitration (“ICCA”) partnered with Queen Mary University of London (“QMUL”) in 2013 to establish a task force comprised of over 50 leading international arbitration experts (the “Task Force”) to “identify and study the issues that arise in relation to third-party funding in international arbitration, and to determine what outputs, if any, would be appropriate to address them.”

Litigation Finance Disclosure — It’s the Claimant’s Choice, for Now

Garrett Ordower

Claimants considering litigation financing often ask whether financing must be disclosed to U.S. courts. The answer in federal courts – for now – is no (save one limited exception).

Rule 26 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure currently requires initial disclosure of a broad range of information including the documents and other materials the party expects to use to support its claims or defenses, the computation of categories of damages, the identification of those who might have discoverable information, and insurance agreements. But the rule doesn’t require all potential disclosures, including for example, litigation financing arrangements.

Why did I go from BigLaw to litigation finance? Good question.

Garrett Ordower

Since joining the Lake Whillans team this summer, I’ve been asking a lot of questions. To effectively finance litigation our team must completely understand the factual and legal basis for the claim. So we ask questions. But they have to be the right ones — informed by diligent research on the particular case and our legal knowledge and experience.

Contact Us

The best way for companies and their counsel to determine if litigation finance is an attractive option is to discuss it with us.

Lee Drucker drucker@lakewhillans.com