The Mysterious Market for Post-Settlement Litigant Finance, an article by Professors Lynn Baker and Ronen Avraham, co-authored by Anthony J. Sebok, of Yeshiva University Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, was recently selected to appear in The ALI Adviser.
Professors Lynn Baker and Ronen Avraham
The article, soon to be published in the New York University Law Review, demystifies a key facet of one of the fastest-growing and most controversial practices at the intersection of law and finance.
The Litigant Finance market, an industry in which financial firms invest in a lawsuit in exchange for a share of the profit, has not been forthcoming with its data. Because of this, “the larger policy debate thus far has largely relied on anecdotes and speculation,” explain Baker, Avraham, and Sebok.
Their scholarship is the first to present systematic, large-scale data on post-settlement litigant funding. The authors were given unprecedented and unrestricted access to sixteen years of funding applications and contracts from one of the largest consumer litigant funding companies in the country. This enabled the authors to, “make transparent the terms and true price to consumers of this formerly mysterious funding.”
Prof. Baker, the Frederick M. Baron Chair in Law, serves as co-director of the Center on Lawyers, Civil Justice and the Media, which focuses on rigorous empirical studies of civil litigation and related subjects. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute. Prof. Avraham, a senior lecturer at Texas Law, is a renowned expert in Torts, the Law and Economics, and Insurance Law.