Litigation Funding Working Group Seeks Comments

The New York City Bar Association’s Litigation Funding Working Group is seeking comments on the issues and practices surrounding litigation funding.

The Working Group was established in October 2018 at the direction of its President, Roger Juan Maldonado. Litigation funding is a burgeoning field that appears destined to be an ever-present part of the legal profession going forward. The City Bar’s Professional Ethics Committee issued Formal Ethics Opinion 2018-5 in July 2018, which generated a significant amount of attention and commentary. The City Bar formed the Working Group to study these issues and to provide a report on any observations and recommendations regarding the practices utilized in connection with litigation funding. The Working Group is comprised of a range of interested professionals, including private practitioners, ethics professors and specialists, litigation funding executives, a former federal judge, in-house counsel, ADR specialists, and representatives from several of the City Bar’s standing committees. The Working Group’s Mission Statement is posted on the City Bar’s website and states in pertinent part:  

The Litigation Funding Working Group is studying the issues and practices surrounding litigation funding. Specifically, the Working Group is addressing the following topics:  (a) the ethics rules and framework relating to the City Bar’s Ethics Opinion 2018-5, (b) current practices in litigation funding and best practices for the future, (c) issues of disclosure regarding litigation funding, (d) litigation funding in the consumer and civil rights arenas and (e) recent litigation funding developments in New York and in certain jurisdictions outside New York. The Working Group will not be revisiting Opinion 2018-5, but is open to exploring potential revisions to the ethics rules and/or legislation.

The Working Group, which expects to issue a report on its findings by the end of 2019, is inviting written comments on the work it is undertaking and welcomes any submissions by July 31, 2019. As the Working Group is reviewing much of the publish literature in this area, comments based on personal and professional experiences with litigation funding would be more useful than references to existing literature. Comments should be emailed to LitigationFunding@nycbar.org.

Note: This post was updated on June 6 to reflect the extended deadline for comments: July 31, 2019. 

About the Association
The mission of the New York City Bar Association, which was founded in 1870 and has 24,000 members, is to equip and mobilize the legal profession to practice with excellence, promote reform of the law, and uphold the rule of law and access to justice in support of a fair society and the public interest in our community, our nation, and throughout the world. www.nycbar.org