What is litigation finance?
In a nutshell, litigation finance is when a third party invests in a lawsuit in exchange for a share of the profit. The idea is that a good legal claim is like an asset. It’s worth money, but there’s a risk. The case is worth money only if you win in court. So if you lose, investors are out all their money.
Having anyone other than the direct parties to the litigation profit from a suit has historically been prohibited. This is the legal doctrine known as champerty.
“Champerty is just a fancy legal name for the basic principle that traditionally the law prohibited a non-party from funding a party for a profit,” explained Maya Steinitz, a law professor at the University of Iowa.
Champerty laws date back to the Middle Ages in England when unscrupulous feudal lords would fund the claims of their underlings in order to harass one another.
“And the idea was to protect the court system, which at the time was weak from being used for purposes that were not achieving justice,” Steinitz said.
Over time, the practice of funding others’ legal claims for profit went the way of jousting and the plague, until 1993 when New South Wales in Australia rolled back its antiquated champerty laws. Lawmakers there wanted to allow outside interests to fund class actions, which were notoriously expensive. Sensing an opportunity, entrepreneurial investors started financing other cases in need of funding and taking a cut of the profits, and an industry was born.
“Litigation funders love to say that some plaintiffs without money from the funders just wouldn’t be able to afford the costs of litigation,” Strom said. “Whatever injustice happened to these parties would just go on challenged.”