One of the larger law firms working the UK motor finance claims market has cut its annual trading loss but is still running deep net liabilities, with its funding costs illustrating how expensive capital has become for volume consumer claims businesses.

As reported by the Law Gazette, Consumer Rights Solicitors Ltd this week filed accounts showing a pre-tax deficit of £6.8 million for the year to August 2025, down from £10.3 million the year before. Turnover rose from £450,000 to more than £3.5 million, largely on recovery of disbursements from cases taken on from other firms.

Net liabilities widened from £11.3 million to £18 million, with £40 million owed to creditors falling due after more than a year. The accounts disclose a £25 million loan facility secured in December 2025 from litigation funder Katch Fund Solutions at 24% annual interest, following a £9 million loan from the same lender on the same terms in October 2024.

The Manchester-based firm values its full claim book at £72 million as at the end of July, but contingent fee work cannot be carried as a balance sheet asset against those liabilities. Auditor Huw Nicholls of Armstrong Watson flagged that the losses, liabilities and outstanding loans indicate a "material uncertainty" over the firm's ability to continue as a going concern.

Director Kavon Hussain said the firm is broadening beyond its Plevin and motor finance book and pursuing group claims through a volume introducer. Motor finance claims remain stayed or slow-moving pending the Financial Conduct Authority's delayed redress scheme.

A coalition of more than 200 corporations and insurers has asked the federal judiciary to write third-party litigation funding disclosure into the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, escalating a campaign that has so far played out mostly in state legislatures and individual courtrooms.

As reported by Bloomberg Law, the signatories include Johnson & Johnson, 3M, Uber, Meta Platforms, Netflix and Samsung Electronics, a group that between them face a substantial share of the funded mass tort, antitrust and patent claims filed in US courts. Law360 reported that Amazon, Anthropic, Chubb and Walmart also signed on.

The letter asks for two things: the name and contact information of "any person or entity who is not a party in the case but provides funding or has a financial interest in the action," and copies of the funding agreements themselves. The coalition argues that disclosure "would provide courts, litigants, and the public with information that is critical to managing cases and maintaining judicial integrity," and describes the absence of a uniform federal rule as inexplicable given the forum shopping it invites.

The request is directed at the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules, which is scheduled to meet in October. A subcommittee chaired by Judge R. David Proctor has been studying litigation funding since 2024 without producing a rule proposal.

Several signatories have already acted on their own. Uber has written disclosure provisions into its customer and driver contracts, and Amazon updated its conditions of use to require disclosure in mass arbitration.

A new commentary argues that the debate over funder disclosure in patent cases is not really about transparency at all, but about whether an independent inventor's family retains the value of what the inventor spent a career building.

As reported by IPWatchdog, the piece is written by Scott Moskowitz, founder of Blue Spike and Wistaria Trading and a named inventor on more than 110 patents. His starting point is that patents are inheritable property with twenty-year terms that outlast careers, yet the US enforcement architecture strips their value while owners are alive.

Moskowitz points to empirical work measuring the market reaction to inter partes review petitions, including a one-day abnormal return of roughly -12% following the first Hayman Capital challenge in 2015. A public company absorbs that as a bad quarter. For an inventor whose net worth is a portfolio, he argues, the same drop is a retirement, and the depressed figure becomes the only number available when the estate is later valued.

The commentary contrasts patents with other asset classes. Real estate, operating-company equity and art each have financing vehicles, insurance products and secondary markets. Patents have none at scale, because no lender will take collateral exposed to a PTAB invalidation rate of 61% to 70%.

Against that backdrop, the piece argues that litigation finance filled the gap because nothing else could, and that pending disclosure measures would remove it. It singles out the March 2026 rules suggestion before the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules, the USITC's proposed 19 C.F.R. § 210.14a, and S.3826, the Litigation Funding Transparency Act of 2026.

Moskowitz's proposed alternative is symmetry: treat funder disclosure the way Rule 26 and Rule of Evidence 411 already treat insurance, with mandatory disclosure on both sides paired with a restriction on using it to prove the merits.

The High Court has declined to pause the Mariana dam litigation against BHP while a dispute over who represents the claimants is resolved, keeping the case on its existing timetable.

As reported by Legal Futures, the court rejected an application by Bailey Glasser International to stay proceedings. Pogust Goodhead, which acts for more than 400,000 claimants over the 2015 Fundão dam collapse in Brazil, characterised the outcome as its first victory in the representation dispute.

The court also directed that the underlying dispute over representation be determined at an expedited hearing on 5 and 6 October. Notably, it rejected Bailey Glasser International's request that the hearing be held in private, meaning the arguments over control of one of the largest group claims in English legal history will be aired publicly.

The ruling preserves the existing case management timetable, including the quantum trial listed for April 2027.

Pogust Goodhead chief executive Alicia Alinia said: "The ruling is an important win for our clients. The court has rejected any attempt to delay this litigation and confirmed that the timetable towards justice remains intact." She added that after almost 11 years, the claimants "deserve clarity, not delay."

The outcome matters beyond the parties. The Mariana claim is among the most heavily funded pieces of group litigation in the English courts, and a prolonged stay would have pushed back recovery timelines for the capital deployed behind it. Bailey Glasser International and the client committee were approached for comment.

Administrators for collapsed litigation lender Woodville have filed their formal statement of proposals, and the arithmetic is stark: unsecured creditor claims of £298,681,307 set against £254,734 of cash in the business.

As reported by the Law Society Gazette, Robert Goodhew and Andrew Stoneman of Kroll Advisory told creditors that Woodville's directors have yet to answer basic questions regarding the use of investor funds. The administrators concluded that rescuing the company as a going concern is not practicable. Administration began on 16 July.

The proposals describe a loan book concentrated on roughly ten law firms and associated entities in Wales and the north-west of England. Only one firm's borrowings appear to be secured. Two of those firms, ASL Boston and McDermott Smith, owe a combined £51.7 million and are themselves in insolvency proceedings.

A further £37 million is owed by parties the administrators describe as connected. That figure includes £17.6 million due from Integrity Protect No 1 Limited, which shares shareholders and directors with Woodville, and £8 million advanced to wholly owned subsidiary Horizon, which entered receivership two weeks before Woodville itself collapsed.

The administrators also flagged that the "performance bonds" issued to retail investors may have been mis-sold or misrepresented, a finding that could shape both regulatory scrutiny and any future recovery claims.

Recoveries so far have been modest. The sale of office furniture raised £650. The administrators' own fee is estimated at £3 million, and they said they are taking advice on enforcement action against directors who have not cooperated with the investigation.

Burford Capital has moved to refinance the nearest maturity on its balance sheet, announcing a private offering of senior secured notes and a conditional call on the full $400 million of notes coming due in 2028.

As reported by PR Newswire, the company plans to issue $300 million in aggregate principal amount of senior secured notes due 2029 through its indirect, wholly owned subsidiary Burford Capital Global Finance LLC, subject to market and other conditions.

The structure is notably more secured than Burford's existing paper. The notes will be guaranteed by Burford Capital and secured on a senior lien basis by substantially all of the assets of Burford Capital Global Finance LLC, along with the capital stock of certain Burford subsidiaries, subject to exceptions.

Proceeds from the offering, together with cash on hand, are earmarked to redeem the 6.250% senior notes due 2028 as soon as practicable after the new deal closes. Burford said it expected to deliver a conditional notice of redemption for the 2028 notes on the same day as the announcement, setting a redemption date of September 24, 2026 for all $400 million outstanding. That redemption is contingent on the successful completion of a $300 million financing.

The offering is a private placement. The securities have not been and will not be registered under the US Securities Act of 1933 or the laws of any other jurisdiction, and will be offered only to persons reasonably believed to be qualified institutional buyers under Rule 144A or to non-US persons outside the United States under Regulation S, in each case limited to qualified purchasers under the Investment Company Act.

Burford is listed on both the New York Stock Exchange and the London Stock Exchange under the ticker BUR.

Texas is moving closer to requiring parties to disclose outside litigation funding, even though the state's own rules advisory body recommended against the change last year.

As reported by Bloomberg Law, the Texas Supreme Court Advisory Committee took up rough-draft disclosure scenarios at a meeting last Thursday. One approach would keep funder identities confidential pending an in-camera review by the trial judge. A second would require a judge to make a good cause finding before a party is compelled to disclose who is backing its case.

The renewed discussion follows an unusual sequence. The Texas Supreme Court first asked the committee for guidance on litigation finance roughly two years ago. In August 2025, the committee recommended against any rule change. The justices were not satisfied with that answer and sent the question back, asking the committee to revisit the issue and return with a proposal.

Much of the committee's debate centered on which funding arrangements should fall outside any disclosure requirement. Several members argued for carving out nonprofits that support litigation without expecting a return, as well as family arrangements such as a parent financing a child's case. "That would be off the table, in my mind," said committee vice chair Marcy Hogan Greer of Alexander Dubose & Jefferson LLP.

Judge Melissa Andrews noted that funding disclosures are already required in the Texas Business Court, where they are used mainly for judicial conflict checks and were modeled on the Fifth Circuit's approach.

The committee is expected to take the matter up again in December, when a disclosure proposal could come to a vote. Texas would join a growing list of states acting on funding transparency, following Ohio's registration and disclosure law and North Carolina's ban on third-party litigation funding.

A new opinion piece defends third-party litigation funding as a precondition for small businesses and independent inventors being able to enforce their intellectual property rights, and argues that pending federal disclosure legislation would undercut them.

As reported by the Washington Examiner, the commentary is written by Kristen Osenga, chief policy counselor of the Inventors Defense Alliance and a professor of law at the University of Richmond School of Law. She frames funding as an access-to-justice question for the innovation economy rather than a question of litigation volume.

The piece points to two measures now before Congress: Representative Darrell Issa's Litigation Transparency Act and Senator Thom Tillis's Tackling Predatory Litigation Funding Act. Osenga argues that mandatory disclosure of funding arrangements would hand well-resourced defendants insight into a plaintiff's financial position and litigation strategy, giving them a means to outlast smaller opponents rather than resolve the merits.

Her economic case rests on the role small firms play in US innovation. Small businesses account for roughly 45% of US GDP, and smaller companies produce approximately 50% more patents per employee than large companies. Without outside capital, she contends, those inventors face infringement by parties who can afford to litigate indefinitely.

The commentary likens litigation funding to the contingency fee arrangement, a long-accepted mechanism for shifting cost risk away from claimants who cannot bear it. "The right to sue is only valuable if you can afford to exercise it," Osenga writes, casting the disclosure debate as one over who retains practical access to the courts.