The Ohio Senate has passed House Bill 105, advancing what supporters describe as one of the most comprehensive third-party litigation funding measures in the country and sending it to Governor Mike DeWine for signature. The legislation targets what its sponsors call an opaque, billion-dollar industry in which anonymous or foreign actors can shape the course of American lawsuits without disclosure.

According to the Ohio House of Representatives, the bill requires parties to disclose the existence of litigation funding agreements to others in a case and bars the sharing of confidential court documents with funders. Sponsored by Reps. Meredith Craig and Jim Thomas, HB 105 would also require both consumer legal funding companies and commercial litigation financiers to register with the Ohio Attorney General before operating in the state, including disclosures about their leadership and affiliations.

The measure goes further than disclosure alone. It prohibits funders from influencing counsel selection, litigation strategy, or settlement decisions, and bars them from paying referral fees to attorneys. In a provision drawing national attention, the bill also restricts any foreign government, foreign corporation, or foreign investor from participating in third-party litigation funding within the state.

Business groups, including small-business advocates, have praised the bill as overdue transparency reform, while critics warn it could chill legitimate access to capital for plaintiffs. With the legislation now before Governor DeWine, Ohio is positioned to become an early bellwether for how aggressively states will regulate litigation finance.

A senior English costs judge has struck out a law firm's entire £30,000 success fee after finding that the firm failed to make reasonable inquiries into its client's existing legal expenses insurance before signing him to a conditional fee agreement. The ruling is a pointed reminder of the diligence funders and firms must exercise around pre-existing coverage before committing a client to risk-based financing.

As reported by Legal Futures, the case, Evans v Fletchers, arose from a 2017 motorcycle accident. The claimant, Peter Evans, had legal expenses insurance through his Zurich home policy, yet the firm took out after-the-event insurance and did not seriously investigate the existing cover until 2019. The claim settled in 2021 for £250,000 plus costs, and the firm billed £61,615, including a £30,365 success fee capped at 25% of damages.

Senior Costs Judge Jason Rowley disallowed the success fee in full, calling the firm's "desultory enquiries" fundamentally inadequate. He noted that specialist personal injury solicitors should have known the legal expenses insurer often differs from the home insurer, that inquiries made two years after the accident demanded greater diligence, and that the correspondence appeared designed to discourage a useful response. A competing firm, he observed, had easily identified the actual insurer.

The decision underscores that since success fees became largely unrecoverable after 2013, courts expect rigorous investigation of available "before-the-event" cover — a discipline with direct implications for how litigation is financed in the UK.

A cautionary first-person account from a retail investor is circulating as a warning about the risks lurking in consumer-facing litigation finance products — not in the underlying legal strategy, but in the structures wrapped around it. The piece arrives as more individual investors are drawn to litigation finance by promises of uncorrelated returns and pristine track records.

As reported by Alternative Assets, author Stefan von Imhof describes losing $10,000 in Fenchurch Legal's SPV 4, a vehicle marketed as financially sound with a "zero" default rate across hundreds of loans. The parent company entered administration in April 2026, putting more than 580 investors at risk of losing most or all of their capital. The core problem, he argues, was not the litigation lending itself but a special-purpose-vehicle structure that lacked genuine bankruptcy remoteness, leaving investors exposed to outside creditors.

His takeaways are blunt. A "0% default rate" is meaningless when platforms define default themselves. True ringfencing requires multiple legal protections, not marketing language, and most retail vehicles he examined were missing at least one. Named security trustees, insurers, and fund managers can disavow involvement when contacted directly. Audit opinions, he stresses, are the most revealing document, citing a reported £782 million in work-in-progress against only £87 million in deployed capital.

The overarching lesson for prospective investors is simple: independently verify every named entity rather than trusting the offering documents — a discipline that separates legitimate litigation finance from its imitations.

The United Kingdom's long-promised overhaul of litigation funding regulation has stalled again, and rival jurisdictions are moving to capture the investment that uncertainty is pushing offshore. Nearly three years after the Supreme Court's 2023 decision in *PACCAR* rendered most litigation funding agreements unenforceable by treating them as damages-based agreements, the government has yet to deliver the corrective legislation it pledged.

As reported by The Times, the continued delay is undermining the competitiveness of England and Wales as a global hub for commercial litigation and arbitration. The Ministry of Justice announced in December 2025 that it intended to clarify that litigation funding agreements are not damages-based agreements, with legislation to follow "when parliamentary time allows." But the 2026 King's Speech omitted any litigation funding bill from the legislative programme, leaving funders and claimants without the statutory certainty they had been promised.

Industry participants have voiced deep disappointment, warning that the absence of reform creates an opening for offshore centers that have already implemented clearer rules on funder involvement. While those jurisdictions compete for capital, the UK continues to develop its framework largely through case law, with little appetite for comprehensive statutory change.

The practical effect, observers note, is that funders weighing where to deploy capital may increasingly look beyond London. For a market that has long marketed itself as the world's premier venue for high-value disputes, the prolonged *PACCAR* limbo carries real economic stakes.

A New York appellate ruling, paired with the state's newly enacted consumer litigation funding law, is giving defendants fresh tools to scrutinize the financing behind personal-injury claims they suspect are fraudulent. Together, the developments mark a notable shift toward transparency in a market that has historically operated outside the view of courts and opposing parties.

As reported by Law360, the Appellate Division, First Department, held in *Lituma v. Liberty Coca-Cola Beverages LLC* that defendants may obtain discovery into a plaintiff's third-party litigation funding where they present evidence suggesting the underlying claims arose from systemic fraud. The November 2025 decision was the first time the court affirmed an order compelling a personal-injury plaintiff to produce funding-related discovery, vacating the note of issue to allow further inquiry.

The ruling lands alongside New York's Consumer Litigation Funding Act, signed by Governor Kathy Hochul on December 19, 2025, and effective 180 days later. The law caps a funder's recovery at 25% of a case's gross proceeds, requires plain disclosure of all charges and cumulative repayment amounts, and gives consumers a 10-business-day right to cancel without penalty. Attorneys are barred from accepting referral fees or holding financial interests in funding companies.

Notably, the statute stops short of mandating disclosure of funding arrangements during active litigation. For now, defendants seeking to expose questionable financing must rely on rulings like *Lituma* to pry those agreements into the open.

Burford Capital has urged the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a Third Circuit decision that dismissed, on jurisdictional grounds, the litigation funder's bid to arbitrate a dispute tied to German antitrust litigation. Burford contends the appeals court committed what it called a "fundamental error" in concluding that federal courts lacked authority over the matter.

As reported by Law360, Burford told the justices on June 16 that the Court's own decision earlier this year in Jules v. Andre Balazs Properties is reason enough to undo the Third Circuit's ruling. In Jules, the Court held that a federal court which compels arbitration of federal claims under Section 4 of the Federal Arbitration Act retains subject-matter jurisdiction to confirm or vacate the resulting award, even without an independent basis for federal jurisdiction over the post-award proceeding.

Burford argues that principle squarely governs its case, and that the appeals court's contrary conclusion cannot stand in light of the new precedent. The funder is asking the justices to take up the matter and correct what it describes as a clear jurisdictional misstep.

The stakes extend beyond a single dispute. For funders, the ability to confirm and enforce arbitral awards in federal court is central to monetizing cross-border claims, and a jurisdictional dead-end at the enforcement stage raises both cost and risk. A decision to hear the case could bring welcome clarity for funders pursuing international, arbitration-related recoveries.

A new entrant has joined the litigation finance conference circuit. The inaugural Chicago Litigation Finance Summit convened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in early May, organized by Charles Zuo, a graduating JD/MBA candidate at Northwestern University.

As reported by Above the Law, Zuo built the program around a deliberately broad agenda, with panels spanning deal structures, funders operating across different capital structures, policy and academic perspectives, and legal technology. He described aiming for "both a diverse set of people and a diverse set of topics," pairing speakers who shared expertise but brought genuinely different vantage points.

Zuo's path to convening the summit included externing at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Illinois, clerking at Patterson Law, working at Bridge Legal, and serving as a law school ambassador for Harvey AI, alongside degrees in English literature, business analytics, and machine learning.

According to the profile, the inaugural event secured robust sponsor backing while maintaining editorial independence, and organizers reported strong feedback from attendees on the return generated by their participation.

The summit's arrival adds Chicago to a growing roster of regional venues where funders, lawyers, academics, and technologists gather as litigation finance continues to mature into an established asset class. Above the Law published the profile as the first installment of a two-part series.