Litigation Funding Is Changing the Contours of Antitrust Class Actions in the U.S. and Abroad

Ruled by Reason

In this episode, AAI Vice President of Policy Laura Alexander discusses third-party litigation funding and its impact on private antitrust class actions with two experts in the field, one of the country’s foremost litigators of antitrust class actions and a representative from a leading litigation funder with deep experience in antitrust. Antitrust class actions are expensive to bring and prosecute. Historically, plaintiffs’ lawyers have used their own assets and traditional bank loans to finance them, in a high-risk/high-reward business model. In the last decade, however, an alternative funding model has emerged: litigation funding firms have begun financing plaintiff-side antitrust litigation for profit using non-recourse debt, shifting risk and reward from the lawyers to the funders and, in the process, changing the landscape of private antitrust litigation and class actions. The conversation starts with a primer on litigation funding, and goes on to discuss how funding decisions factor into leadership and settlement dynamics, how litigation funding impacts which cases are brought and who brings them, and how monetization of claims is changing incentives for opt outs and what that might portend for class actions. Finally, the episode concludes with an analysis of the different role that litigation funding plays in collective actions abroad, and what lessons we might draw from foreign jurisdictions for funding class actions in the U.S.