News & Blog
Foreign Litigation Funders Search for New Claims in Latin America
Flush with capital and in search of their next big payout, foreign litigation funders are exploring new opportunities to invest in litigation and arbitration in Latin America.
The Netherlands is a “Claims Paradise” Fueled by Third Party Litigation Funding
wyers for truck manufacturers accused of colluding on prices appeared in Dutch court this week to fend off damages claims, warning that the Netherlands is in danger of becoming a “claims paradise”, reports Mlex.
Op-ed: “EU Parliament Shouldn’t Hand European Justice to the Secretive Litigation Finance Industry”
“The European Parliament faces a crossroads: should it hand over control of the EU’s lawsuit system to an obscure but enormous industry known as third party litigation funding (TPLF)?”, writes Harold Kim, President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform, for the Brussels Morning Newspaper.
Claimants’ Lawyers Try to Keep Details of Litigation Funding Agreement Secret in Mass Claim Against Google
Claimants’ lawyers in the £920 million class action against Google are attempting to keep details of the litigation funding agreement behind the claim from being disclosed.
Class Action Claimants in Australia to Get Nothing After Litigation Funder Destroys Books, Declared Insolvent
Australian, “after administrators of a now-defunct litigation funder suggested it be liquidated.”
Dutch Court Throws Out Funded Collective Action Against Oracle and Salesforce
Court of Amsterdam has dismissed a 10-billion-euro collective action lawsuit against Salesforce and Oracle brought on behalf of 75,000 claimants. The court found that the data privacy group that launched the case, The Privacy Collective, could not actually prove that it represents the interests of 75,000 Dutch citizens.
Proposed Class Action Reforms in Australia Cause Funders and Lawyers to Race to File Cases
The Australian Senate is currently considering legislation that would rein in third party litigation funding in class action lawsuits, causing plaintiffs’ lawyers and litigation funders to work overtime to get new cases into court before the bill becomes law. As a result, at least nine class actions were filed in the last month, according to a report on Lawyerly.com. That’s a sharp increase from the 18 class actions filed between March and September of this year. The Corporations Amendment Act (CAA) is the bill causing the mad rush to the courthouse. The CAA would rein in third party litigation funding in class actions in a few different ways. First, it would restrict fees for class action lawyers and funders to a maximum of 30 percent of any total payout, give courts the power to approve and adjust funding agreements and require funders to be licensed. The proposal would also require each plaintiff to consent to participate in the class action and abide by the funder’s terms, creating an opt-in system for funded class actions. This is not the first time that plaintiffs’ lawyers in Australia made a mad dash to file cases before new class-action legislation passed. There was a similar jump in filings shortly before other litigation funding regulations took effect in August 2020–so much so that around 15 percent of all filings in 2020 occurred in the two days before the implementation of the regulations, according to Monash Business School Professor Vince Morabito. The bill passed the House just six days after the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Corporations and Financial Services approved it. The legislation is now up for debate in the Senate.
German Legal Tech Group Attacks EU Parliament Plan on Litigation Funding
As reported by Artificial Lawyer, the German Legal Tech Group released a statement in opposition to the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament’s proposal to bring transparency and commonsense safeguards to third party litigation funding (TPLF) in Europe.
