Litigation Commons^™

Panel 2: Types Of Litigation Funding, Geoffrey P. Miller, Maya Steinitz, Joshua Schwadron, Bradley Wendel, Michael Faure, Jef De Mot, Travis Lenkner

Faculty Scholarship

This is a transcript from the second panel of the 2015 NYU School of Law conference: Litigation Funding: The Basics and Beyond.

Panel Two

The second panel will build on the basics. Participants will explain and discuss different subcategories of funding, each of which may raise different conceptual, practical and/or regulatory concerns.

Panelists:

• Geoffrey Miller, New York University School of Law (Moderator)
• Maya Steinitz, University of Iowa College of Law
• Joshua Schwadron, Founder and CEO, Mighty
• Bradley Wendel, Cornell Law School
• Michael G. Faure, Maastricht University & Rotterdam University, the Netherlands
• Jef De Mot, Ghent University
• Travis Lenkner, Gerchen Keller …

Back To Basics: Public Adjudication Of Corporate Atrocities Torts, Maya Steinitz

Faculty Scholarship

The editors of this online symposium invited me to contribute to the subject of an argument I have recently advanced. This argument is that the world needs a permanent International Court of Civil Justice (ICCJ) to adjudicate cross-border mass torts. A common reaction to this proposal has been to suggest that the function of such an international court be assumed by one of the existing arbitration institutions or filled by a new one. I’d like to take this opportunity to argue against that idea.

Corporate atrocities, which are the symposium’s focus, may be crimes, but they also have a tort …

Corporate Darwinism: Disciplining Managers In A World With Weak Shareholder Litigation, James D. Cox, Randall S. Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

Because representative shareholder litigation has been constrained by numerous legal developments, the corporate governance system has developed new mechanisms as alternative means to address managerial agency costs. We posit that recent significant governance developments in the corporate world are the natural consequence of the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of shareholder suits to address certain genre of managerial agency costs. We thus argue that corporate governance responses evolve to fill voids caused by the inability of shareholder suits to monitor and discipline corporate managers.

We further claim that these new governance responses are themselves becoming stronger due in part to the rising …

Adopting The Gay Family, Cynthia Godsoe

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Drug Design Liability: Farewell To Comment K, Aaron Twerski, James A. Henderson Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Incorporating Legal Claims, Maya Steinitz

Faculty Scholarship

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in commercial litigation funding. Whereas the judicial, legislative, and scholarly treatment of litigation finance has regarded litigation finance first and foremost as a form of champerty and sought to regulate it through rules of legal professional responsibility (hereinafter, the "legal ethics paradigm"), this Article suggests that the problems created by litigation finance are all facets of the classic problems created by "the separation of ownership and control" that have been a focus of business law since the advent of the corporate form. Therefore, an "incorporation paradigm," offered here, is more appropriate. "Incorporating …

Harmonizing Third-Party Litigation Funding Regulation, Victoria Sahani

Faculty Scholarship

Third-party litigation funding is no longer a new phenomenon, but rather is a mainstay in global commerce and dispute resolution. Yet many observers still consider the third-party litigation funding industry as a “wild west” due to a lack of regulation in many countries. Some of the countries that have regulations suffer from a lack of uniformity and an array of conflicting laws at the sub-national level (i.e., the laws of states, provinces, territories, etc.). For example, the United States has a confusing patchwork of state laws on third-party litigation funding. This Article proposes harmonizing the regulatory framework for third-party litigation …

Victim Or Thug? Examining The Relevance Of Stories In Cases Involving Shootings Of Unarmed Black Males, Sherri Keene

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Disaggregated Classes, Benjamin P. Edwards

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Cocktails On Campus: Are Libations A Liability?, Susan S. Bendlin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Role Of The Profit Imperative In Risk Management, Christopher French

Faculty Scholarship

Risks in the world abound. Every day there is a chance that each of us could be in a car accident. Or, one of us could be the victim of a tornado, flood or earthquake. Every day someone becomes deathly ill from an insidious disease. Our properties are in constant peril—one’s house could catch fire at any time or a tree could fall on it during a storm. Any one of these events could have devastating financial consequences, and they are just a few of the many risks that impact our daily lives. One of the principal ways we manage …

Class Counsel As Litigation Funders, Morris A. Ratner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Appraisal Arbitrage And The Future Of Public Company M&A, Minor Myers, Charles R. Korsmo

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Does The Quality Of The Plaintiffs' Law Firm Matter In Deal Litigation?, Adam B. Badawi, David H. Webber

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines how the stock market reacts to the filing of lawsuits against mergers and acquisitions targets as the quality of the plaintiffs’ law firm varies. Our primary dataset includes all cases of this type filed in the Delaware Chancery Court from November 2003–September 2008. We group the law firms that file these suits into higher and lower quality categories using several quantitative and qualitative measures. We hypothesize that target firm share value should reflect the likelihood that litigation will result in an increase in merger consideration. This effect is likely to depend, at least in part, on law …

When The Lawyer Screws Up: A Portrait Of Legal Malpractice Claims And Their Resolution, Herbert M. Kritzer, Neil Vidmar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Mdl Vortex Revisited, Thomas B. Metzloff

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Litigation Isolationism, Pamela K. Bookman

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past two decades, U.S. courts have pursued a studied avoidance of transnational litigation. The resulting litigation isolationism appears to be driven by courts’ desire to promote separation of powers, international comity, and the interests of defendants. This Article demonstrates, however, that this new kind of “avoidance” in fact frequently undermines not only these values but also other significant U.S. interests by continuing to interfere with foreign relations and driving plaintiffs to sue in foreign courts.

This Article offers four contributions: First, it focuses the conversation about transnational litigation on those doctrines designed to avoid it—that is, doctrines that …

The Case For An International Court Of Civil Justice, Maya Steinitz

Faculty Scholarship

We live in a world in which the victims of cross-border mass torts de facto (not de jure) have no court to turn to in order to pursue legal action against American multinational corporations when they are responsible for disasters. 1 The only way to provide a fair and legitimate process for both victims and corporations is to create an International Court of Civil Justice (ICCJ). This Essay seeks to start a conversation about this novel institutional solution. It lays out both a justice case, from the plaintiffs' viewpoint, and an efficiency case, from a corporate defendant's viewpoint, for why …

Ross Et Al. V. American Express Et Al.: The Story Behind The Spread Of Class Action-Barring Arbitration Clauses In Credit Card Agreements, Nancy A. Welsh, Stephen J. Ware

Faculty Scholarship

Article Extract:

A recent case from the Southern District of New York, Ross et al v. American Express et al, is an antitrust case, but it also is an important case for arbitration. Ross consolidated several class actions in which plaintiffs alleged that major credit card issuing banks, including American Express (Amex), First USA, Bank of America, Citibank, Chase, Discover, and others “violated the Sherman Act by agreeing with their competitors to implement and maintain mandatory class action-barring arbitration clauses as a term or condition for holding their general purpose credit cards.

Third-Party Litigation Funding And The Dodd-Frank Act, Victoria Sahani

Faculty Scholarship

This article questions whether the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (“Dodd-Frank Act”) should apply to the growing phenomenon of third-party litigation funding, in which outside entities invest in litigation or arbitration for profit. Currently, the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom lightly regulate third-party litigation funding, but the majority of the day-to-day oversight comes through voluntary funder self-regulation. Most third-party funders of commercial disputes are private hedge funds that are subject to the securities regulations of the jurisdictions in which they operate. The Dodd-Frank Act is a relatively new statute in the United States that regulates …

Conflict Of Laws, James P. George, Susan T. Phillips

Faculty Scholarship

States' and nations' laws collide when foreign factors appear in a lawsuit. Nonresident litigants, incidents outside the forum, and judgments from other jurisdictions can create problems with personal jurisdiction, choice of law, and the recognition of foreign judgments. This Article reviews Texas conflict cases from Texas state and federal courts during the Survey-period from November 1, 2011 through October 31, 2013. The Article excludes cases involving federal-state conflicts; intrastate issues, such as subject matter jurisdiction and venue; and conflicts in time, such as the applicability of prior or subsequent law within a state. State and federal cases are discussed together …

Debt-Buyer Lawsuits And Inaccurate Data, Peter A. Holland

Faculty Scholarship

Pursuant to secret purchase and sale agreements (also known as forward flow agreements), the accounts that banks sell to debt buyers are often sold “as is,” with explicit and emphatic disclaimers that the debts may not be owed, the amounts claimed may not be accurate, and documentation may be missing. Despite their full knowledge that the accuracy and completeness of the data has been specifically disclaimed by the bank, when they sue consumers, debt buyers tell courts that the information obtained from the bank is inherently reliable and accurate. In order to avoid a fraud on the courts, the contents …

What Patent Attorney Fee Awards Really Look Like, Saurabh Vishnubhakat

Faculty Scholarship

This essay gives an empirical account of attorney fee awards over the last decade of patent litigation. Given the current attention in legislative proposals and on the Supreme Court’s docket to more liberal fee shifting as a check on abusive patent litigation, a fuller descriptive understanding of the current regime is of utmost importance to forming sound patent litigation policy. Following a brief overview of judicial experience in patent cases and trends in patent case filing, this study presents analysis of over 200 attorney fee award orders during 2003-2013.

The study confirms the commonsense view that plaintiffs have tended to …

Justice Deferred Is Justice Denied: We Must End Our Failed Experiment In Deferring Corporate Criminal Prosecutions, Peter Reilly

Faculty Scholarship

According to the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”), deferred prosecution agreements are said to occupy an “important middle ground” between declining to prosecute on the one hand, and trials or guilty pleas on the other. A top DOJ official has declared that, over the last decade, the agreements have become a “mainstay” of white collar criminal law enforcement; a prominent criminal law professor calls their increased use part of the “biggest change in corporate law enforcement policy in the last ten years.”

However, despite deferred prosecution’s apparent rise in popularity among law enforcement officials, the article sets forth the argument …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Law, Business, And Economics Scholars In Alice Corp. V. Cls Bank, No. 13-298, Jason Schultz, Brian Love, James Bessen, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

The Federal Circuit’s expansion of patentable subject matter in the 1990s led to a threefold increase in software patents, many of which contain abstract ideas merely tethered to a general-purpose computer. There is little evidence, however, to suggest this expansion has produced an increase in software innovation. The software industry was highly innovative in the decade immediately prior to this expansion, when the viability of software patentability was unclear and software patents were few. When surveyed, most software developers oppose software patenting, and, in practice, software innovators tend to rely on other tools to capture market share such as first-mover …

The Affordable Care Act, Remedy, And Litigation Reform, Brendan S. Maher

Faculty Scholarship

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (“ACA”) rewrote the law of private health insurance. How the ACA rewrote the law of civil remedies, however, is — to date — a question largely unexamined by scholars. Courts everywhere, including the United States Supreme Court, will soon confront this important issue.

This Article offers a foundational treatment of the ACA on remedy. It predicts a series of flashpoints over which litigation reform battles will be fought. It identifies several themes that will animate those conflicts and trigger others. It explains how judicial construction of the statute’s functional predecessor, the …

A Primer On The Use Of Dangerous Trial Exhibits, Robert M. Jarvis

Faculty Scholarship

It sometimes is necessary at trial to introduce a dangerous exhibit-such as a bomb, gun, or knife-to bolster a client's story, discredit an opposing witness, or give the jury a clearer picture of the underlying events. Doing so, however, requires care and planning. Not only do many courts have specific rules regarding how such exhibits are to be noticed, handled, and displayed, but there are also numerous practical and tactical considerations that must be weighed. In this Article, the author presents the first comprehensive discussion regarding dangerous trial exhibits and offers suggestions for their successful use.

The Jury Wants To Take The Podium -- But Even With The Authority To Do So, Can It? An Interdisciplinary Examination Of Jurors' Questioning Of Witnesses At Trial, Mitchell J. Frank

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Ice Cube Bonds: Allocating The Price Of Process In Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, Edward J. Janger, M. B. Jacoby

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Private Policing Of Mergers & Acquisitions: An Empirical Assessment Of Institutional Lead Plaintiffs In Transactional Class And Derivative Actions, David H. Webber

Faculty Scholarship

Transactional class and derivative actions have long been controversial in both the popular and the academic literatures. Yet, the debate over such litigation has thus far neglected to consider a change in legal technology, adopted in Delaware a dozen years ago, favoring selection of institutional investors as lead plaintiffs in these cases. This Article fills that gap, offering new insights into the utility of mergers and acquisitions litigation. Based on a hand-collected dataset of all Delaware class and derivative actions filed from November 1, 2003 to December 31, 2009, I find that institutional investors play as large of a role …