News and analysis dedicated to the commercial litigation funding sector including regulatory issues, case developments, funding activities, and more.
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Certum Group Survey: 70% of In-House Counsel Know Litigation Funding, Only 6% Have Used It
A new research brief from litigation finance and insurance provider Certum Group finds that corporate legal departments are broadly aware of litigation risk transfer products but almost never use them, a gap the firm describes as “the next frontier in corporate litigation strategy.”
According to the brief published by Certum Group, which surveyed 44 General Counsel and in-house litigation attorneys, roughly 70% of respondents are familiar with litigation funding but have never used it, while only about 6% have. The brief was authored by Kevin Skrzysowski, a Director at Certum Group, whose litigation funding team also includes Director William Marra, a former U.S. Supreme Court clerk.
The survey characterises in-house litigation risk as operational rather than existential. Employment and intellectual property disputes drew the highest concern levels, while roughly two-thirds of respondents reported no concern at all about antitrust or mass tort exposure. Decision-making was consistent across defensive and affirmative matters, with likelihood of success (~84%) and cost to pursue (~74%) the most frequently cited factors.
On affirmative claims, respondents said they would be more likely to proceed if cost and risk could be shifted to an insurer (~62%), a contingent-fee firm (~49%) or through claim monetisation (~46%). A litigation funder ranked lowest at ~28%. Looking forward, however, roughly 51% said they would consider litigation funding, ahead of capital protection insurance (~43%) and claim monetisation (~41%), with about 30% ruling out all such products.
Cost certainty (~51%) and budget constraints (~46%) were the leading drivers of interest. Among the small group that has used litigation funding, two-thirds reported satisfaction with the decision.
Invenio Partner Warns Automation Bias Is the Real AI Risk in Funding Underwriting
An Invenio LLP partner has published a detailed argument that the principal danger of artificial intelligence in litigation finance underwriting is not fabricated citations but the quiet erosion of the human judgment that underwriting depends on.
According to Real Talk About AI in Litigation Finance Underwriting, written by Brenna Legaard, large language models perform reliably on well-defined, data-rich tasks such as analyzing prior art and preparing claim charts, and they work without fatigue or anchoring bias. What they cannot do is predict case outcomes, because the training data does not contain them. Models learn from published opinions, while the vast majority of disputes end in confidential settlements that are never mapped. Legaard writes that models “have known knowns, perhaps known unknowns, and no unknown unknowns whatsoever.”
The piece cites a 2024 study finding hallucination rates between 58% and 88% on factual legal questions, with the weakest performance on less prominent cases, and notes that model accuracy degrades as input length grows. Its sharper concern is automation bias: decision-makers deferring to polished output under time pressure, so that “the model’s confident framing then becomes an unwary underwriter’s confident framing.”
Legaard draws a parallel to McKinsey research on insurance underwriting, where firms that mandated black-box models over human judgment found that staff lost faith in the models and underwriting skills atrophied. The recommended response is cultural rather than technical: open discussion of where AI use introduces confirmation bias, and hiring underwriters who interrogate outputs rather than merely producing them faster.
