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Key Takeaways from LFJ’s Virtual Town Hall: Spotlight on AI & Technology

By John Freund |

Key Takeaways from LFJ’s Virtual Town Hall: Spotlight on AI & Technology

On Thursday, February 27th, LFJ hosted a virtual town hall on AI and legal technology. The panel discussion featured Erik Bomans (EB), CEO of Deminor Recovery Services, Stewart Ackerly (SA), Director at Statera Capital, David Harper (DH), co-founder and CEO of Legal Intelligence, and Patrick Ip (PI), co-founder of Theo AI. The panel was hosted by Ted Farrell, founder of Litigation Funding Advisers.

Below are some key takeaways from the discussion:

Everyone reads about AI every day and how it’s disrupting this industry, being used here and being used there. So what I wanted to ask you all to talk about what is the use case for AI, specific to the litigation finance business?

PI: There are a couple of core use cases on our end that we hear folks use it for. One is a complementary approach to underwriting. So initial gut take as to what are potentially the case killers. So should I actually invest time in human underwriting to look at this case?

The second use case is a last check. So before we’re actually going into fund, obviously cases are fluid. They’re ever-evolving. They’re changing. So between the first pass and the last check, has anything changed that would stop us from actually doing the funding? And then the third more novel approach that we’ve gotten a lot of feedback

There are 270,000 new lawsuits filed a day. Generally speaking, in order to understand if this lawsuit has any merit, you have to read through all the cases. It’s very time consuming to do. Directionally, as an application, as an AI application, We can comb through all those documents. We can read all those emails. We can look through social and digest public information to say, hey, these are the cases that actually are most relevant to your fund. Instead of looking through 50 or 100 of these, these are the top 10 most relevant ones. And we send those to clients on a weekly basis. Interesting.

I don’t want you to give up your proprietary special sauce, but how are you all trying to leverage these tools to aid you and deliver the kind of returns that LPs want to see?

SA: We can make the most effective use of AI or other technologies – whether it’s at the very top of the funnel and what’s coming into the funnel, or whether it’s deeper down into the funnel of a case that we like – is that we try to find a way to leverage AI to complement our underwriting. We think about it a lot on the origination side just making us more efficient, letting us be able to sift through a larger number of cases more quickly and as effectively as if we had bodies to look through them all, but also to help us just find more cases that may be a potential fit.

In terms of kind of the data sources that you rely on. I think a question we always think about, especially for kind of early stage cases is, is there enough data available? For example, if there’s just a complaint on file, is that going to give you enough for AI to give you a meaningful result?

I think most of the people on this call would tell you duration is in a lot of ways the biggest risk that funders take. So what specific pieces of these cases is AI helping you drill down into, and how are you harnessing the leverage you can access with these tools?

DH: We, 18 months ago or so, in the beginning of our journey on this use case in law, were asked by a very, very big and very well respected personal injury business in the UK to help them make sense of 37,000 client files that they’d settled with insurers on non-fault motor accident.

And we ran some modeling. We created some data scientist assets, which were AI assets. And their view was, if we had more resources, we would do more of the following things. But we’re limited by the amount of people we’ve got and the amount we get per file to spend on delivering that file. So we developed some AI assets to investigate the nearly 40,000 cases, what the insurers across different jurisdictions and different circumstances settled on.

And we, in partnership with them, improved their settlement value by 8%. The impact that had on their EBITDA, etc. That’s on a firm level, right? That’s on a user case where a firm is actually using AI to perform a science task on their data to give them better predictive analysis. Because lawyers were erring on the side of caution. they would go on a lowball offer because of the impact of getting that wrong if it went to court after settlement. So I think for us, our conversations with financiers and law firms, alignment is key, right? So a funder wants to protect their capital and time – the longer things take, the longer your capital’s out, the potential lower returns.

AI can offer a lot of solutions for very specific problems and can be very useful and can reduce the cost of analyzing these cases, but predictive outcome analysis requires a lot of data. And so the problem is, where do you get the data from and how good is the data? How unstructured or structured are the data sets?

I think getting access to the data is one issue. The other one is the quality of the data, of course, that you put into the machine. If you put bad data in a machine, you might get some correlations, but what’s the relevance, right? And that’s the problem that we are facing.

So many cases are settled, you don’t know the outcome. And that’s why you still need the human component. We need doctors to train computers to analyze medical images. We need lawyers and people with litigation experience who can tell a computer whether this is a good case, whether this is a good settlement or a bad settlement. And in the end, if you don’t know it because it’s confidential, someone has to make a call on that. I’m afraid that’s what we have to do, right? Even one litigation fund or several litigation funders are not going to have enough data with settlements on the same type of claim to build a predictive analytical model on it.

And so you need to get massive amounts of data where some human elements, some coding is still going to be required, manual coding. And I think that’s a process that we’re going to have to go through.

You can view the full panel discussion here.

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John Freund

John Freund

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Padronus Finances Collective Action Against Meta Over Illegal Surveillance

By John Freund |

Austrian litigation funder Padronus is financing the largest collective action ever filed in the German-speaking world. The case targets Meta’s illegal surveillance practices.

Together with the Austrian Consumer Protection Association (VSV) as claimant, the German law firm Baumeister & Kollegen, and the Austrian law firm Salburg Rechtsanwälte, Padronus has filed collective actions in both Germany and Austria against Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd. The lawsuits challenge Meta’s extensive surveillance of the public, which, according to Padronus and VSV, violates European data protection law.

“Meta knows far more about us than we imagine – from our shopping habits and searches for medication to personal struggles. This is made possible by so-called business tools that are deployed across the internet. The U.S. corporation is present on third-party sites even when we are logged out of its platforms or when our browser settings promise privacy. This breaches the GDPR,” explains Richard Eibl, Managing Director of Padronus.

Meta generates revenue by allowing companies to place paid advertisements on Instagram and Facebook. Which ad is shown to which user depends on the user’s interests, identified by Meta’s algorithm based on platform activity and social connections. In addition, Meta has developed tools such as the “Meta Pixel,” embedded on countless third-party websites, including those dealing with sensitive personal matters. The “Conversions API” is integrated directly on web servers, meaning data collection no longer occurs on the user’s device and cannot be detected or disabled, even by technically savvy users. It bypasses cookie restrictions, incognito mode, or VPN usage.

Millions of businesses worldwide use these tools to target consumers and analyze ad effectiveness. “Use of these technologies is now omnipresent and an integral part of daily internet usage. Every user becomes uniquely identifiable to Meta at all times as soon as they browse third-party sites, even if not logged into Facebook or Instagram. Meta learns which pages and subpages are visited, what is clicked, searched, and purchased,” says Eibl. He adds: “This surveillance has gone further than George Orwell anticipated in 1984 – at least his protagonist was aware of the extent of his surveillance.”

While Meta users can configure settings on Instagram and Facebook to prevent the collected data from being used for the delivery of personalized advertising, the data itself is nevertheless already transmitted to Meta from third-party websites prior to obtaining consent to cookies. Meta then, without exception, transfers the data worldwide to third countries, in particular to the United States, where it evaluates the data to an unknown extent and passes it on to third parties such as service providers, external researchers, and authorities.

Numerous German district courts (including Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, Leipzig) and more than 70 other courts have already confirmed Meta’s illegal surveillance in over 700 ongoing individual lawsuits. These first-instance rulings, achieved by lawyers Baumeister & Kollegen, are not yet final. Eibl notes: “The courts have awarded plaintiffs immaterial damages of up to €5,000. If only one in ten of the up to 50 million affected individuals in Germany joins the collective action, the dispute value rises to €25 billion. This is the largest lawsuit ever filed in the German-speaking world.”

Meta’s lack of seriousness about user privacy is well-documented. In 2023, Ireland’s data protection authority fined Meta €1.2 billion for illegal U.S. data transfers. In 2021, Luxembourg imposed a €746 million fine for misuse of user data for advertising. In 2024, Ireland again fined Meta €251 million for a major security breach. In July 2025, a U.S. lawsuit was launched against several Meta executives, demanding $8 billion in damages for systematic violations of an FTC privacy order. Richard Eibl notes: “This case goes to the heart of Meta’s business model. If we succeed, Meta will have to stop this unlawful spying in our countries.”

The new collective action mechanism for qualified entities such as VSV is a novel legal instrument. If successful, the unlawful practice must be ceased, and compensation paid to consumers who have joined the case.

The lawsuit is expected to trigger political tensions with the current protectionist U.S. administration. Only last week, the U.S. President again threatened the EU with new tariffs after the Commission imposed a €2.95 billion fine on Google. “We expect the U.S. government will also try to exert pressure in our case to shield Meta. But European data protection law is not negotiable, and we are certain we will not bow to such pressure,” says Julius Richter, also Managing Director of Padronus.

Consumers in Austria and Germany can now register at meta-klage.de and meta-klage.at to join the collective action without any cost risk. Padronus covers all litigation expenses; only in the event of success will a commission be deducted from the recovered amount.

Seven Stars, PayTech Launch Crypto-to-Litigation Bond with 14% Fixed Return

By John Freund |

In a move that could reshape both crypto and legal funding markets, Seven Stars Structured Solutions (UK) and PayTech (Dubai) have announced the launch of the world’s first “Real World Staking” bond—an investment vehicle that allows cryptocurrency holders to fund UK litigation assets and earn a fixed 14% annual return.

A press release from Seven Stars Legal details how the offering bridges the $2.3 trillion crypto market and the traditionally conservative litigation finance sector. Issued under a Dubai VARA-regulated framework and processed through licensed VASP GCEX, the bond enables high-net-worth and institutional crypto investors to earn yield from UK legal claims—specifically, the massive discretionary commission arrangement (DCA) claims market following a recent UK Supreme Court ruling.

Unlike conventional DeFi staking models that depend on volatile smart contracts, this new “Real World Staking” concept ties digital assets to real-world legal outcomes. Proceeds fund Seven Stars’ litigation strategies, which have seen over £40 million deployed across 56,000 cases with a reported 90%+ success rate. Investors can receive returns in USDC or GBP and benefit from a three-jurisdiction compliance structure involving Dubai, the UK, and the EU.

This initiative is being billed as a milestone in the institutional adoption of digital assets, offering crypto holders both fixed income potential and exposure to a highly regulated, historically insulated asset class. It also underscores a broader trend of convergence between blockchain technology and traditional finance.

If successful, this model could set a template for future tokenized legal finance products, raising key questions about the role of crypto infrastructure in expanding access to alternative legal assets. Legal funders and institutional investors alike will be watching closely.

Gramercy Turmoil Threatens Pogust’s £36bn BHP Claim

By John Freund |

The law firm leading one of the UK’s largest-ever class actions is facing a destabilizing internal revolt that could ripple through a landmark case. Pogust Goodhead—fronting a £36 billion claim against BHP tied to the 2015 Mariana dam disaster—has seen senior lawyers depart and staff raise concerns over governance and independence as tensions mount with its principal backer, Gramercy Funds Management.

An article in Financial Times reports that the flashpoint follows the abrupt replacement of co-founder Tom Goodhead as CEO and a subsequent $65 million credit top-up from Gramercy, on top of an earlier substantial funding package. According to the FT, at least two senior partners—previously central to marquee matters, including BHP and Dieselgate—have stepped down, while a staff group has challenged transparency around funder involvement. The Solicitors Regulation Authority is said to be monitoring events as BHP’s counsel queries whether the firm can stay the course. Pogust’s chair rejects any suggestion of external control, insisting the firm remains independently managed and committed to clients.

For litigation finance observers, the story lands at the intersection of capital intensity, governance, and case continuity. Large, multi-year collective actions carry heavy, lumpy spend profiles and complex funder covenants; when leadership flux and fresh capital coincide mid-stream, questions naturally arise about strategic autonomy, settlement posture, and reputational risk.

If the rift deepens, the implications extend beyond a single case: market confidence in high-leverage portfolio strategies could be tested, and counterparties may push harder on disclosure or consent terms. The episode will likely fuel ongoing debates over funder influence and the safeguards needed when billions—and access to justice—are on the line.