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Move Over Carnival: Litigation Funding in Brazil is Heating Up!

February 13, 2018

Move Over Carnival: Litigation Funding in Brazil is Heating Up!

Writing for Vannin’s Funding in Focus series, Carolina Ramirez, Managing Director in Vannin’s newly-formed New York office, describes the litigation funding climate in South America’s largest and most populous nation. Ramirez highlights both the perceptions and practical applications of litigation finance in Brazil, as well as the regulatory climate and challenges facing industry growth in the region.
Although third party funding arrived on the Brazilian scene only recently, the practice has been warmly embraced relative to other Latin American markets. That has to do with Brazil’s liquidity crisis following the Great Recession, in addition to fallout in the aftermath of Operation Car Wash, or Operação Lava Jato, and the subsequent reliance on arbitration as a result. According to Ramirez, Brazilians maintain a perception that litigation funding is utilized solely by impecunious claimants, or those facing liquidity constraints. Although perceptions are gradually changing, she points to one local practitioner who claims that “case law on the matter is scarce and major Brazilian arbitration chambers do not publish their precedents, so parties (be it funders, funded parties or adversaries to a funded party) still have to deal with a reasonable (and potentially damaging) degree of uncertainty.” Yet despite the uncertainty, the benefits of litigation funding are widely being recognized, with one practitioner going so far as to state that the practice “will evolve to [allow] major companies seeking reasonable financing that allows them to pursue their core business objectives while conducting high level litigation.” Such is the reality of litigation funding in other major jurisdictions, so why not Brazil? Major obstacles to the adoption of litigation funding have to do with costs and time constraints — the former containing too few, and the latter containing far too many. The cost of filing a claim (appeal included) in Brazil is extraordinarily low, which of course precludes firms from seeking external funding. Additionally, cases can go through many layers of appeal before reaching conclusion, which means that funders can’t accurately predict the timing of their expected recovery. Essentially, the barriers to justice that exist in Brazil work against litigation funders, whereas the barriers that exist in the United States, for example (those being high upfront costs and balance sheet exposure), directly play into a litigation funder’s hands. According to Ramirez, by and large, third party funding is unregulated in Brazil. “Only recently did the Brazil-Canada Chamber of Commerce (“CAM/CCBC”) – one of the most renowned institutions in Brazil – issue a resolution specifically recommending that parties disclose the use of funding at the outset of an arbitration (Administrative Resolution 18/2016).” Practitioners on the ground believe in the likelihood that other arbitral institutions will at some point promulgate further regulations on third party funding in Brazil, though at present, the industry remains unregulated. So is Brazil on the precipice of future growth in the area of litigation funding? Ramirez seems to think so. “The resounding message,” she writes, “is that Brazil is ripe for third party funding and that the time to enter the market is now. It is also clear that practitioners are enthusiastic about the prospect of having foreign third party funders with significant experience enter the market and level the playing field which has thus far been dominated by a single local Brazilian third party funder.” To read Ramirez’s article in its entirety, please visit this link. 
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