Funding the fights

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With litigation funders having established their own industry regulator and starting to move into arbitration cases, there are more reasons to believe that third-party funding is here in a big way

Leslie Perrin, chairman of litigation funder Calunius Capital, remembers the atmosphere in New York during the autumn of 2008 when he was attempting to raise money for Calunius’s inaugural litigation fund. Tumbleweed was rolling down Wall Street and Citigroup’s share price was plunging by the second. It was an inauspicious time for raising capital.

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Suspicious minds

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Third-party litigation funding has yet to really take off, despite being around for five years. While a mature market is still some way away, litigation specialists are finally seeing that self-funding is not the only way forward.

Big-ticket disputes in the public sphere and funded by a third party are rare. The biggest case in the UK to date came in 2008 and featured an £89m negligence claim brought by Stone & Rolls against audit firm Moore Stephens. The dispute was driven by Norton Rose’s Sam Eastwood for client Stone & Rolls and was funded by IM Litigation Funding. The case was thrown out by the House of Lords as part of its grand finale in 2009, gifting a massive victory to Barlow Lyde & Gilbert client Moore Stephens.

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