Litigation Finance 101 by Trialfunder.com: Webinar Review

Investors have taken a keen interest in the legal funding space as the alternative finance industry grows in popularity, and the new company Trial Funder is making it easier to connect investors with cases that need funding. In their well researched hour-long webinar, they covered some of the essential points of legal funding that investors, attorneys, and plaintiffs alike will find interesting. We reviewed the webinar to give you some of the highlights.

Anoush Hakimi, COO of Trial Funder, begins by pointing out that the legal finance industry has grown by 300% in only the last few years. Considering the fact that legal finance was still in its infancy in in the mid 1990s, that’s quite an astonishing feat!

In this short period of time, the industry has developed into a self-regulating system that evens out the legal playing field.

Legal funding, as many of you are already aware, is a process where a third party provides money to a party involved in a lawsuit in exchange for a financial award. Trial Funder goes on to describe three types of legal funding: consumer funding, where money goes directly to plaintiffs in need; litigation cost funding, where money helps pay for the cost of litigation; and subprime law firm loans. Balanced Bridge offers consumer lawsuit funding to plaintiffs and what is being called litigation cost funding to attorneys , so we’ll focus on those areas.

In a consumer legal funding case, plaintiffs receive a cash advance against a future settlement or verdict. Trial Funder points out that this type of funding is not only lucrative for investors, but it also fulfills an important social need: it helps plaintiffs hold negligent or irresponsible defendants accountable for their actions while also boosting the economy.

To demonstrate this point, the webinar recounts examples of a woman who suffered a slip and fall injury and uses a consumer funding advance to cover living expenses while she is out of work and waiting for her settlement to deliver. It also showcases the experience of a 9/11 First Responder who, as a result of the toxins at Ground Zero , was suffering from various health conditions and used his funding to receive medical care while waiting on a payment from the Victim Compensation Fund. These examples are worth watching on your own.

Unlike plaintiff funding, litigation cost funding (or attorney legal funding) helps small firms and solo attorneys, who often have limited resources, cover the costs of litigation or access their fees in advance. According to Trial Funder, a typical 1 or 2 partner firm will have 30 to 40 active cases at a time, and the attorneys must front the costs for all of these cases at once. With so many pending cases, small firms often face serious cash flow issues. Attorney legal funding can help lawsuits reach their full potential.

The webinar goes on to discuss the pertinent issue of ethics in legal funding. They first discuss why litigation finance was considered unethical by some, but why now the practice has gained recognition as an ethical and accepted practice.

Finally, Trial Funder describes the importance of thorough underwriting, and provides details on how a legal funding company would take special considerations when evaluating cases. Unlike banks qualifying loan applicants, legal funding firms pay careful attention to attorney experience, litigation traits and timeline, and other legal aspects of the case.

In all, Trial Funder presents a wonderful overview of the legal funding industry, its benefits to investors and consumers, and the intricacies of running a legal funding firm. We highly recommend this webinar to anyone interested in learning more about legal funding.

Written by Shayna Keyles.