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Community Spotlight: Caroline Taylor, Founding Partner, Ignitis

By John Freund |
March 6, 2025

Community Spotlight: Caroline Taylor, Founding Partner, Ignitis

Caroline Taylor is a Founding Partner of Ignitis, an early-stage litigation funder focused on developing cases to assess viability and prepare them for full litigation. With over a decade of litigation experience, Caroline brings a unique blend of funding expertise and strategic legal insight, leveraging an extensive professional network to support cases from inception to resolution. Ignitis partners with claimants, foundations, corporate clients, lawyers, experts, funders, and other legal professionals to ensure that each case has what it needs to maximize its chance of success.

Before founding Ignitis, Caroline was a partner at a leading international collective redress firm. She played a key role in expanding the firm’s European operations, including opening offices across several countries, assembling and leading teams, and driving case development and management. Her work in securing litigation funding helped support the development of over 30 cases across Europe and the UK. Caroline’s ability to seamlessly integrate operations between U.S. and European offices proved instrumental in advancing initiatives on both sides of the Atlantic. Her deep understanding of collective redress procedures in multiple European jurisdictions, combined with her experience taking cases from concept to resolution, makes her well-suited for her role at Ignitis.

During her time in private practice, Caroline specialized in class actions, complex litigation, and personal injury cases, gaining firsthand experience of the impact corporate misconduct can have on individuals. This exposure sharpened her litigation skills and solidified her commitment to justice. Caroline also served in several leadership roles, including as a Board Member of the American Association for Justice, Chair of its Railroad Section, and as a Board and Executive Committee Member of the Tennessee Trial Lawyers Association. She has received numerous accolades, including recognition by The National Trial Lawyers, Best Lawyers in America, and Super Lawyers. Caroline is a frequent speaker at international legal conferences.

She is admitted to practice in Tennessee, Florida, and Kentucky state courts, as well as in numerous federal and appellate courts in the United States and England and Wales.

Company Name and Description: Ignitis AG is an early-stage funding company. Ignitis was founded to solve a critical challenge: parties often need initial capital to develop the case into something viable to attract larger litigation funders. Essentially, to secure funding, one must first invest capital. Drawing on decades of experience in litigation and institutional investment, we are uniquely positioned to provide the capital and expertise needed to kickstart cases and drive them toward resolution. We focus solely on early-stage funding, ensuring that quality cases get the financing they need to be successful while increasing access to justice.

Company Website: www.ignitisag.com

Year Founded: 2024

Headquarters: Zug, Switzerland

Area of Focus: We focus specifically on initial case development and early-stage funding. We put our money in at initial, risky stages, to develop the case and prepare it for full funding and filing. We not only inject capital, but we also provide expertise and advice along the way to ensure that the case has the greatest opportunity for success.

Member Quote: “Too many meritorious cases never make it to court, not because they lack merit, but because the injured parties lack the financial resources or the know-how to move forward. At Ignitis, we are committed to improving access to justice by investing in cases that other funders might overlook and offering the expertise needed for thorough case development—ensuring more individuals have their day in court.”

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John Freund

John Freund

Commercial

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Commercial

Litigation Financiers Organize on Capitol Hill

By John Freund |

The litigation finance industry is mobilizing its defenses after nearly facing extinction through federal legislation last year. In response to Senator Thom Tillis's surprise attempt to impose a 41% tax on litigation finance profits, two attorneys have launched the American Civil Accountability Alliance—a lobbying group dedicated to fighting back against efforts to restrict third-party funding of lawsuits.

As reported in Bloomberg Law, co-founder Erick Robinson, a Houston patent lawyer, described the industry's collective shock when the Tillis measure came within striking distance of passing as part of a major tax and spending package. The proposal ultimately failed, but the close call exposed the $16 billion industry's vulnerability to legislative ambush tactics. Robinson noted that the measure appeared with only five weeks before the final vote, giving stakeholders little time to respond before the Senate parliamentarian ultimately removed it on procedural grounds.

The new alliance represents a shift toward grassroots advocacy, focusing on bringing forward voices of individuals and small parties whose cases would have been impossible without funding. Robinson emphasized that state-level legislation now poses the greater threat, as these bills receive less media scrutiny than federal proposals while establishing precedents that can spread rapidly across jurisdictions.

The group is still forming its board and hiring lobbyists, but its founders are clear about their mission: ensuring that litigation finance isn't quietly regulated out of existence through misleading rhetoric about foreign influence or frivolous litigation—claims Robinson dismisses as disconnected from how funders actually evaluate cases for investment.

Commercial

ISO’s ‘Litigation Funding Mutual Disclosure’ May Be Unenforceable

By John Freund |

The insurance industry has introduced a new policy condition entitled "Litigation Funding Mutual Disclosure" (ISO Form CG 99 11 01 26) that may be included in liability policies starting this month. The condition allows either party to demand mutual disclosure of third-party litigation funding agreements when disputes arise over whether a claim or suit is covered by the policy. However, the condition faces significant enforceability challenges that make it largely unworkable in practice.

As reported in Omni Bridgeway, the condition is unenforceable for several key reasons. First, when an insurer denies coverage and the policyholder commences coverage litigation, the denial likely relieves the policyholder of compliance with policy conditions. Courts typically hold that insurers must demonstrate actual and substantial prejudice from a policyholder's failure to perform a condition, which would be difficult to establish when coverage has already been denied.

Additionally, the condition's requirement for policyholders to disclose funding agreements would force them to breach confidentiality provisions in those agreements, amounting to intentional interference with contractual relations. The condition is also overly broad, extending to funding agreements between attorneys and funders where the insurer has no privity. Most problematically, the "mutual" disclosure requirement lacks true mutuality since insurers rarely use litigation funding except for subrogation claims, creating a one-sided obligation that borders on bad faith.

The condition appears designed to give insurers a litigation advantage by accessing policyholders' private financial information, despite overwhelming judicial precedent that litigation finance is rarely relevant to case claims and defenses. Policyholders should reject this provision during policy renewals whenever possible.

Commercial Regulatory Issues

Valve Faces Certified UK Class Action Despite Funding Scrutiny

By John Freund |

The UK Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) has delivered a closely watched judgment certifying an opt-out collective proceedings order (CPO) against Valve Corporation, clearing the way for a landmark competition claim to proceed on behalf of millions of UK consumers. The decision marks another important moment in the evolution of collective actions—and their funding—in the UK.

In its judgment, the CAT approved the application brought by Vicki Shotbolt as class representative, alleging that Valve abused a dominant position in the PC video games market through its operation of the Steam platform. The claim contends that Valve imposed restrictive pricing and distribution practices that inflated prices paid by UK consumers. Valve opposed certification on multiple grounds, including challenges to the suitability of the class representative, the methodology for assessing aggregate damages, and the adequacy of the litigation funding arrangements supporting the claim.

The Tribunal rejected Valve’s objections, finding that the proposed methodology for estimating class-wide loss met the “realistic prospect” threshold required at the certification stage. While Valve criticised the expert evidence as overly theoretical and insufficiently grounded in data, the CAT reiterated that a CPO hearing is not a mini-trial, and that disputes over economic modelling are better resolved at a later merits stage.

Of particular interest to the legal funding market, the CAT also examined the funding structure underpinning the claim. Valve argued that the arrangements raised concerns around control, proportionality, and potential conflicts. The Tribunal disagreed, concluding that the funding terms were sufficiently transparent and that appropriate safeguards were in place to ensure the independence of the class representative and legal team. In doing so, the CAT reaffirmed its now-familiar approach of scrutinising funding without treating third-party finance as inherently problematic.

With certification granted, the case will now proceed as one of the largest opt-out competition claims yet to advance in the UK. For litigation funders, the ruling underscores the CAT’s continued willingness to accommodate complex funding structures in large consumer actions—while signalling that challenges to funding are unlikely to succeed absent clear evidence of abuse or impropriety.