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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.”

About the author

John Freund

John Freund

Commercial

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Commercial

Academics Fact-Check German Business Lobby’s Case for Restricting Litigation Funding

Two competition law academics have published a point-by-point examination of the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry's position on collective redress and litigation funding, concluding that several of the central claims advanced in support of tighter restrictions are false, misleading or unsupported.

As set out in a Kluwer Competition Law Blog analysis by Eduardo Silva de Freitas of the Asser Institute and Lena Hornkohl of the University of Vienna, the DIHK statement calls for litigation funders to be brought under supervision comparable to financial market regulation and for funding agreements to be disclosed in full. The authors test five of its underlying assertions.

The DIHK's claim that transparency requirements are lacking is assessed as false: Article 10 of the Representative Actions Directive already establishes disclosure obligations for litigation funding arrangements. The assertion that funders operate in a "nearly unregulated space" is described as misleading, the authors pointing to a European Commission study finding that third-party funding legislation exists in the vast majority of EU member states.

The claim of a widespread consensus that the Directive requires significant improvement is treated as unsupported, with the authors finding no sufficient body of independent studies behind it. The criticism that no minimum registration period applies to qualified entities is called misleading, since Article 4(3)(a) requires 12 months of actual public activity before designation.

The analysis reserves particular attention for the DIHK's figure that funders typically take 20% to 50% of damages. The authors describe this as misleading, noting that German law caps funder remuneration at 10% and that differentiated models operate below that level.

Commercial

Law Firms Turn to MSO Structures to Access Outside Capital and Partner Liquidity

Management services organisations have become a leading route for outside investors to participate in the economics of US law firms without breaching the prohibition on non-lawyer ownership, and the structure is drawing sustained interest from private capital.

As explained in a Nixon Peabody analysis by Allan H. Cohen and Samantha R. Barbere, an MSO is a non-professional entity that provides administrative and support services to a professional practice. The arrangement separates professional ownership from administrative infrastructure: non-licensed investors may own the MSO, while licensed attorneys retain exclusive control of the law firm and all legal work.

The authors identify two principal motivations driving adoption. The first is access to capital, giving firms resources to invest in technology such as artificial intelligence and cybersecurity at a time of escalating client demands for efficiency. The second is partner liquidity — the bifurcated structure allows partners to monetise the value of their ownership through a sale to non-professional investors, expanding options beyond traditional buyouts and transactions between lawyers.

Execution requires care. Firms must transfer non-professional assets to the MSO and enter into an administrative services agreement governing the relationship. Critically, fees paid to the MSO must reflect fair market value for the services provided, rather than a percentage of revenue, in order to comply with the fee-splitting prohibition in ABA Model Rule 5.4(a).

For the litigation finance market, the structure matters because it represents a parallel channel for outside capital to reach the legal services sector — one that competes with, and in some cases complements, case-level and portfolio funding as a means of financing law firm growth.

Commercial

Govia Thameslink Class Action Collapses After Funding and Insurance Fall Through

A long-running opt-out collective action against Govia Thameslink Railway has come to an end after the claim failed to secure a replacement class representative backed by adequate funding and insurance, marking one of the more consequential funding-driven failures in the Competition Appeal Tribunal's collective proceedings regime.

As reported by Global Competition Review, the claim has collapsed as a result of funding problems. The proceedings, certified in October 2022, alleged pricing discrimination in the operator's fare structure on behalf of rail passengers.

The claim was left without a class representative following the death of David Boyle, who had brought the action. Walter Merricks, best known for leading the Mastercard collective action, applied to take over the role but withdrew in January 2026 after being unable to obtain after-the-event insurance for the proceedings.

That withdrawal carried its own consequences. As reported by the Law Society Gazette, the Tribunal ordered interim payments totalling £70,000 — £45,000 to the defendants and £25,000 to the estate — finding it "beyond argument" that reasonable costs incurred should be borne by Merricks and his funder, Litigation Capital Management. The Tribunal considered the £337,695 originally claimed to be excessive.

With the proceedings stayed, the Tribunal set a deadline of 4pm on 24 July for an application to approve a suitable replacement class representative, failing which the collective proceedings order would be revoked and the claim decertified.

The outcome underscores how tightly the viability of UK collective proceedings is bound to the availability of funding and ATE cover, and how quickly a certified claim can unravel when either becomes unobtainable.