As LFJ reported yesterday, the start of 2025 has seen a flurry of activity at the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT), with two major class actions backed by litigation funders going to trial this week.

An article in City AM covers the start of the trial in the Car Delivery Charges class action at the CAT marking the first time that a follow-on cartel proceedings has gone to trial in the UK. The claim, which began in 2020, focuses on allegations that five shipping companies acted as a cartel between October 2006 and September 2012, raising the cost of shipping new vehicles to the UK and Europe. The trial against the two remaining defendants, MOL and NYK, follows the CAT’s approval of a settlement with CSAV in December 2023, and separate settlements with WWL/EUKOR and “K” Line in December 2024. 

Mark McLaren, a former executive at consumer group Which?, is acting as the class representative on behalf of UK consumers and businesses who were overcharged for vehicle purchases. Scott+Scott has been instructed as the solicitors for the claim, with Woodsford providing the litigation funding for the class action. The counsel team for the trial includes Sarah Ford KC and Sarah O’Keefe from Brick Court Chambers, and Nicholas Gibson from Matrix Chambers.

Belinda Hollway, lead partner at Scott+Scott, emphasised that “this trial marks a very significant milestone in the case and is the culmination of five years of hard work and dedication.” Holloway also highlighted the CAT’s approval of the previous settlements in the case, which she argued “demonstrates the power of the UK opt out regime to secure compensation for class members”.

In a post on LinkedIn, Woodsford said that they are “proud to be supporting Mark McLaren in the landmark Car Delivery Charges class action trial”, and that they “remain committed to the consumers affected by the cartel with settlements, in respect of 3 out of the 5 cartelists, in excess of £38m having already been reached in the course of 2023 and 2024.”

The trial is provisionally expected to last for ten weeks, with the claimants seeking to achieve around £100 million in compensation from the two remaining defendants.

More information about the class action can be found on the Car Delivery Charges website.

Past orders, judgments, transcripts and notices in Mark McLaren Class Representative Limited v MOL (Europe Africa) Ltd and Others can be found on the CAT’s website.

Whilst the new year is now in full swing and industry leaders are fully focused on their strategic priorities for 2025, it is still an apt time to recognise the work and achievements of law firms and litigation funders across the previous year.

The inaugural Chambers UK Awards is set to be hosted in London on Thursday 13 February. Building upon the firm’s work highlighting the world’s top legal professionals through its guides, Chambers' first annual awards event will celebrate the top legal teams across the UK. The awards categories cover a range of practices, from commercial disputes to international arbitration, with only a select few firms shortlisted for each award.

As part of this inaugural awards ceremony, Chambers will be honouring the top litigation funders in the UK and has already announced the five funders who are shortlisted for this award:

• Bench Walk Advisors 
• Harbour 
• Manolete Partners 
• Therium Capital Management 
• Woodsford  

Those firms selected have already been recognised in the 2025 Chambers UK Guide, with the awards recognising each legal team for their outstanding legal work and achievements, impressive strategic growth and excellence in client service delivery. The awards are not exclusive to national law firms, with teams shortlisted in the ‘Regional Firm of the Year’ and ‘Scottish Firm of the Year’ categories.

The inaugural event is already sold out, but the full list of firms shortlisted across each category can be found on the Chambers website.

Harvey and LawPage, two legal tech companies, are sponsoring the event.

The influence of multinational technology companies has unsurprisingly made them targets for collective proceedings brought on behalf of consumers and businesses, who allege that their positions of market dominance have been leveraged to unfairly raise prices. In what is likely to be the first of many in the UK, a lawsuit brought against Apple has commenced at the Competition Appeal Tribunal. 

An article in Reuters covers the start of the trial in the UK Apple App Store claim, with the claimants seeking up to £1.5 billion in compensation for Apple’s alleged abuse of its market dominance in charging app developers a 30% commission on its digital store and thereby causing customers to be overcharged for their App Store purchases. The claim is representing UK consumers who purchased an app, content, services or subscriptions from the App Store since 1 October 2015 whilst using an iPhone or iPad device, with the class action reportedly representing around 20 million customers.

Dr Rachael Kent, a researcher and senior lecturer at King’s College London is acting as the class representative, with Hausfeld & Co. providing legal advice and Vannin Capital financing the class action. The trial is expected to continue for seven weeks and conclude on February 27, with the Tribunal’s ruling to follow at some point in the next year.

More information about the class action can be found on the UK Apple App Store Claim website.

Past orders, judgments, transcripts and notices in Dr. Rachael Kent v Apple Inc. and Apple Distribution International Ltd can be found on the CAT’s website.

In recent years, the alternative business structure (ABS) model for law firm ownership is one that has mostly been discussed in relation to the US, where individual states have relaxed restrictions on these kind of hybrid legal services models. However, a new company launched in the UK demonstrates that this jurisdiction may still be leading the way for innovative partnerships between funders, law firms, insurers and legal marketing services.

Exclusive reporting by Bloomberg Law covers the launch of the new legal funding venture Legatus Holdings Limited, whose subsidiaries include Asertis, KP Law, Toremis Speciality, and Cavis. This new business aims to provide a holistic approach to the funding of mass tort and group claims, with funding, legal services, insurance, and claims marketing and acquisition contained under one organisation. Whilst this new group will allow for these services to be aligned, the subsidiary businesses are reportedly not required to work exclusively within the Legatus business.

Speaking with Bloomberg Law, Legatus’ CEO Philip Holden said that the new company is unique within the UK in having “those four subsidiaries vertically integrated into legal assets.” Holden emphasised that “each operating business is led by market-leading professionals with established pedigrees in their respective fields”, and that forming this new venture will allow Asertis “to grow more rapidly”.

With the launch of Legatus, the internal structure and leadership of these subsidiary companies is evolving. As mentioned above, Holden has taken on the chief executive duties at Legatus, having previously joined Asertis in 2022 as general counsel for the funder. Duncan Hedar, partner at KP Law, will be assuming the role of CEO at Asertis, whilst the previous incumbent Ian Madej, will be taking on the position of chief commercial officer at Legatus. Nathan Hull, previously head of contingent and litigation risk at Vale Insurance Partners, will be leading the insurance services component in Toremis Speciality. Whilst, Neil Gee will be doing the same for the new mass tort marketing arm, Cavis.

Legatus’ newly launched website does not provide any additional details on the venture, but provides a registered address for Brabners LLP in Manchester.

Although litigation funding has grown into an increasingly mainstream sector of the broader legal services industry, the strategies that shape funders’ business models are often quite opaque to those outside the funding market.

A recent episode of the Alternative Fund Insight (AFI) podcast provided useful insights from Fabian Chrobog, founder of NorthWall Capital, who discussed the firm’s approach to legal assets and their strategy for scaleability in a wide-ranging discussion.

In the interview, hosted by Will Wainewright, Chrobog outlined NorthWall’s overall legal assets strategy: “We’ve had a lot of fun running that strategy, it’s been hugely successful. It’s generated some fairly outstanding returns for LPs and it’s something we continue to be very active in. So really what we are looking for, what we are good at, is the underwriting of complex collateral. Sometimes it’s a situational complexity, it could be these asset-backed situations which are fairly complex. 

In this case we provide loans to law firms that are secured by very large pools of potential proceeds from legal assets claims. These could be litigations that could generate in some cases hundreds of millions of revenues per case or over a dozen different cases. So, what we do is we can provide working capital to the law firm without taking security over any specific case, just saying we will get paid back from the first one, two, three cases you win or settle. 

This is not exactly rocket science because you can tell which cases are most likely to settle, because there is a lot of legal precedent or there might have already been settlement discussions. So, you provide that working capital and you effectively just underwrite the cases that you have a high degree of confidence could be successful, you zero everything else, and then you severely haircut the cases that you believe could be won or settled, and you lend against those at a very low loan to value.

At the end of the day, you just have to believe that one, maybe two, of these cases resolve and sometimes these dockets have 12, 15, 20 different cases where you should have a very high degree of certainty that you’re going to get repaid. We got into this because we started looking at one of these situations and we realised there was more to do, and we’ve been very successful in originating deal flow here.”

Asked by Wainewright about NorthWall’s decision-making process when it comes to choosing which legal situations to focus on, Chrobog said: “You’re trying to remove yourself from having to be right more frequently than you’re wrong. You’re trying to create a situation where there is really a very asymmetric risk-reward profile.

But then the way that you do it is, and what is different about NorthWall and how we approach this space, is that we’re credit investors predominantly. We’re looking at how can we reduce our downside. We always pair a credit analyst with a lawyer internally, and then we get external litigation advice to help us with the individual cases.

The credit analyst’s job is to make sure the firm doesn’t run out of money, the lawyer’s job is to make sure that we really truly understand these cases, and then the investment committee’s job is to make sure that we’ve been conservative in our underwriting process.”

Prompted by Wainewright on this being an example of the idiosyncratic strategy that you find within alternatives, Chrobog went on to expand on how NorthWall’s ensures its approach is attractive to investors.

“What you have to remember is that scalability is important. Scalability is important because the people that we have are very good and they expect to be compensated, so it’s a relatively expensive strategy to run. But our investors don’t want to invest small capital, they want to invest substantial amounts of money and they want to see it deployed. 

So, what we are really focused on is we only finance large portfolios of cases because it provides downside protection, a diversification of potential revenue streams, but it also allows for a certain element of scalability. There’s no point being in a niche strategy that you can’t scale to be meaningful.”

The full interview is available on the AFI website.

Whilst Germany is not a jurisdiction that is traditionally seen as a prime market for third-party legal funding, one litigation funder based out of Bonn is reporting that it has continued to see plentiful demand for dispute funding in 2024.

In an overview of its 2024 activities, Foris AG revealed that it has financed 29 new cases from almost 450 financing requests, maintaining the funder's average volume of funded cases over recent years. These new funded cases were from a range of different dispute areas including medical malpractice, inheritance, corporate and commercial contracts. The funder also saw a rise in the number of cases resolved, rising from 24 in 2023 to 33 in 2024, with FORIS AG's CEO, Frederick Iwans stating that around 80 percent of these cases reached successful resolutions.

In order to support this growth in the number of cases that FORIS AG is financing, the litigation funder and its partners launched a fund for professional investors. The fund, which has a target volume of 50 million euros, has already received its first subscriptions with Iwans saying that the high level of interest in the fund shows that litigation financing has struck a chord with potential investors.

The funder also announced that the submission of the annual report of FORIS AG with the audited annual results for 2024 is scheduled for March 28, 2025.