News and analysis dedicated to the commercial litigation funding sector including regulatory issues, case developments, funding activities, and more.

The Court of Appeal of England and Wales today refused BHP’s application for permission to appeal the High Court’s landmark liability judgment in the Mariana disaster litigation.

The High Court found BHP responsible for the 2015 collapse of the Fundão tailings dam in Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil, concluding that BHP is liable for the disaster under both the Brazilian Civil and Environmental law.

The Court of Appeal heard BHP’s application for permission to appeal the decision on 12 March after BHP was refused permission to appeal by the High Court in January.  BHP asked the court for permission to contest the findings that it was a polluter, and that it had knowledge of the risks associated with the dam before the collapse. The mining company also challenged the finding that all claimants brought their claims in time.

The Court of Appeal’s refusal marks a further victory for the hundreds of thousands of Brazilian victims who have spent over ten years pursuing justice, and a major setback for BHP. The High Court’s liability judgment remains in force, and BHP has exhausted the ordinary routes by which it could seek to overturn it.

In today’s ruling, the court concluded that BHP’s proposed grounds of appeal have no real prospect of success and there is no other compelling reason for the appeal to be heard.  The decision means that the parties will proceed to the trial of Stage 2 of the proceedings, which will determine issues of causation, loss and damages. The trial evidence is to be heard from April 2027 to December 2027, with closing submissions listed for March 2028.

Lord Justice Fraser wrote in the decision: “I do not accept that any of the grounds relating to BHP’s liability for the dam collapse are reasonably arguable. I do not consider that there is any foundation for the different complaints that the trial judge failed to engage with BHP’s case.”

Jonathan Wheeler, lead partner for the Mariana litigation at Pogust Goodhead, said: “The Court of Appeal has now joined the High Court in finding that BHP’s grounds of appeal have no real prospect of success – an emphatic and unambiguous outcome. BHP remains liable for the worst environmental disaster in Brazil’s history, and it will not be given another bite at the cherry.”

“Our clients have waited more than a decade for justice while BHP pursued every procedural avenue to avoid accountability; those avenues are now closed. We are focused on securing the compensation that hundreds of thousands of Brazilians have been owed for far too long.”

Legal Asset Servicing (LAS) has appointed Gian Kull as Chief Executive Officer to lead the institutional scale-up of its operational platform for litigation finance. The London-based platform currently supports more than €7 billion in claim value across litigation funders, law firms, and insurers backed by leading institutional investors.

According to the National Law Review, Kull joins LAS from Omni Bridgeway, where he served as Regional Portfolio Manager and led the UK office to become the funder’s largest globally by investment volume. He previously served as Chief Investment Officer at Augusta Ventures, where he managed one of the UK’s leading litigation finance portfolios.

LAS positions itself as the financial infrastructure layer for legal assets, providing funders, law firms, insurers, and capital providers with a single platform to monitor, manage, and report on legal asset portfolios. “Billion-dollar portfolios are still being managed on spreadsheets and fragmented tools,” Kull said in the announcement. “LAS exists to fix that. We’ve built the operational layer that litigation finance needs to function at institutional scale.”

The platform also targets one of the structural barriers to a secondary market in litigation finance: due diligence friction. Because LAS holds structured, multi-party data tied to each case, it functions as an instant data room for secondary transactions — reducing diligence timelines from weeks to hours and supporting cleaner information transfer when portfolio assets change hands. Kull’s appointment marks the start of an accelerated commercial phase for LAS as the asset class continues to mature.

Jonathan Sablone, a commercial disputes attorney with three decades of cross-border, financial services, and litigation finance experience, has launched Sablone Advisory LLC — a Boston-based boutique positioned to serve claimants, funders, and insurers across the legal finance ecosystem under the tagline “at the intersection of law and finance™.”

According to Sablone Advisory LLC, the new firm offers underwriting, diligence, monitoring, and asset management services to litigation funders and to insurers offering contingent risk products. On the claimant side, Sablone Advisory works with plaintiffs and their counsel to position cases for funding, including packaging case portfolios for cross-collateralized funding and insurance wrappers — services that have become increasingly central as funders and insurers structure deals across multiple matters and risk layers.

“I founded Sablone Advisory to assist clients with the most intractable problems and issues facing the legal finance industry,” said Sablone in announcing the launch. “‘At the intersection of law and finance’ is not just a slogan, but a practical, commercial approach to legal problem-solving that I have practiced for decades.”

The launch reflects a continuing trend in the litigation finance industry: senior practitioners with capital-markets and complex-litigation backgrounds spinning out of large institutional platforms to offer specialized, independent advisory and underwriting services. As funders increasingly structure portfolio-level deals, layer ATE and contingent risk insurance into capital stacks, and pursue cross-border recoveries, demand for senior independent diligence and asset management — particularly from professionals fluent in both legal strategy and structured finance — has grown.

For claimants and their counsel, the firm’s case-positioning services are likely to resonate in a market where funders are increasingly selective about case quality, structure, and counsel pedigree. For funders and insurers, an independent boutique offering monitoring and asset management — separate from origination — represents the kind of service-provider infrastructure that more mature alternative-asset markets typically develop as they scale.

Inquiries can be directed to Jonathan Sablone at jsablone@sabloneadvisory.com or via www.sabloneadvisory.com.