Congratulations to Washington and Lee law professor Victoria Shannon! Professor Shannon’s forthcoming work Harmonizing Third-Party Litigation Funding Regulation is named among the top ten papers in the SSRN Negotiation & Dispute Resolution eJournal. The paper will appear in the Cardozo Law Review in the coming academic year.
From the abstract:
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 do have regulations suffer from a lack of uniformity, particularly countries with sub-national political divisions (e.g., states, provinces, territories, etc.) that have conflicting laws. The United States is an example of a country that has a confusing patchwork of laws on third-party litigation funding. This article proposes harmonizing the regulatory framework for third-party litigation funding in the United States by: (1) identifying the three categories of interactions – transactional, procedural, and ethical – that make up third-party litigation funding; (2) proposing areas for regulation within those three categories; and (3) linking those regulations together through cross-references to create a harmonized regulatory framework. This approach will weave a regulatory “safety net” of minimum standards for behaviors and interactions of the players in third-party litigation funding arrangements to ensure the integrity of the dispute resolution system.
