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The Rules Of Professional Responsibility And Legal Finance: A Status Update, Anthony J. Sebok
The Rules Of Professional Responsibility And Legal Finance: A Status Update, Anthony J. Sebok
Articles
Legal finance occurs when strangers fund litigation for profit. Traditionally looked upon with suspicion in the common law, and limited by the doctrines of champerty and maintenance, legal finance is now a thriving part of the American legal landscape. Legal finance has been promoted as a solution to the access-to-justice problems facing working and middle class Americans, as well as a new asset class for Wall Street. At the center of legal finance, however, are lawyers – not the lawyers who write the contracts for the financing – but the lawyers for the cases being financed.
Over the past decade, …
An Empirical Investigation Of Third Party Consumer Litigant Funding, Ronen Avraham, Anthony J. Sebok
An Empirical Investigation Of Third Party Consumer Litigant Funding, Ronen Avraham, Anthony J. Sebok
Articles
This is the first large-scale empirical study of consumer third-party litigation funding in the United States. Despite being part of the American legal system for more than two decades there has been almost no real data-driven empirical study to date. We analyzed funding requests from American consumers in over 100,000 cases over a twelve year period. This proprietary data set was provided to us by one of the largest consumer litigation funder in the United States.
Our results are striking and important. We find that the funder plays an important role in the American legal system by screening cases. Our …