perspective, a civil lawsuit is rather like a derivatives contract. Its value to a claimant comes from the performance of an underlying asset—litigation—with an uncertain, potentially lucrative outcome. No surprise, then, that some see the allure of funding legal expenses upfront in exchange for a share of the proceeds if the case is won or settled. Payouts are uncorrelated with other markets, so investors can use them to diversify.
firms and it is easy to see why the industry is growing strongly. A survey by Westfleet Advisors, a litigation-finance broker, finds that commercial cases in America attracted $2.3bn of investment in the year to June. Speaking at an industry conference in New York in September, David Perla of Burford Capital, a litigation funder that is listed in London, trumpeted his firm’s $2.5bn in assets and $225m in half-year post-tax profits. Michael Nicolas of Longford Capital, a private funder, said that lawyers are now more receptive to. So too are companies and universities harbouring “monetisable” claims of patent infringement.
Third-party funding can have some unpalatable outcomes. In 2016 billionaire Peter Thiel funded a lawsuit against Gawker Media, a news website, over its publication of a sex tape featuring a professional wrestler, which eventually drove the company out of business.might increase the frequency of such uncomfortable consequences. But Tony Sebok, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law, points out that preventing that activity would mean virtuous causes go unfunded.
The best the industry can do is to form a trade association requiring members to uphold a code of conduct. This already exists in Britain and mostly seems to work well. Industry players could also make the scale and scope of deal flow public. Mr Sebok argues that funders should be more transparent on prices charged to litigants, particularly in consumer cases, where claimants tend to be more vulnerable than on the commercial side.
Here the fact of the correct reallocation of resources is necessary
Hush money are so common
totalirianism grows