Litigation Finance

Overview

The rapidly expanding field of commercial litigation finance holds great promise for litigants, law firms and investors alike. For businesses that hold meritorious litigation claims it provides a new, flexible form of financial management as well an effective way to mitigate the expense and outcome uncertainty of pursuing them. For law firms, it provides a way to hedge the risk of contingency matters and capitalize sustained litigation efforts. And for investors, it offers an opportunity to diversify into a novel asset class with high-yield and non-market-correlated returns.

But for all participants in litigation finance, the evolving field can be as abundant with transactional risk and legal uncertainty as it is with opportunity. Our team is able to help investors, litigants and law firms navigate these risks while extracting maximum financial benefit from their deals.

We assist clients with structuring and negotiating commercial litigation funding transactions and advise clients throughout the entire life cycle of financed cases.  Specifically, we assist clients with:

  • Transaction structuring: Designing funding transactions, which can be structured in a myriad of ways, to maximize tax efficiency and minimize the risks presented by arcane state law prohibitions, such as usury and champerty.
  • Funder control: Balancing a funder’s need to monitor the litigation process with the risk that it will unduly interfere with a plaintiff’s attorney-client relationship.
  • Legal ethical issues: Advising clients on the rules governing the conduct of lawyers involved in these transactions, including disclosure obligations, fee-sharing prohibitions and other legal ethics rules.
  • Disclosure: Assist clients in navigating the myriad of new state and court-imposed disclosure requirements associated with litigation funding.
  • Collection: Minimizing a funder’s credit risk associated with the collection of post-judgment/post-settlement proceeds by implementing collateral, personal guaranty and other credit support structures.
  • Preservation of privilege: Ensuring that a funder obtains sufficient information to perform an effective risk/reward assessment of the underlying claim without causing a waiver of a litigant’s evidentiary privileges.

Insights

Firm News | 2 min read | 11.19.24

Crowell Earns National Practice Rankings in Best Law Firms 2025

Crowell & Moring ranked nationally in 21 practice areas in the 2025 edition of Best Lawyers “Best Law Firms.” In addition, the firm was ranked in 36 metropolitan categories.