The Truth About Litigation Finance
“You gotta have the horses.” That is the old adage in football, a battle of attrition where manpower is paramount. The takeaway is simple: you’re not positioned to win, at least not consistently or at scale, without the right roster.
You can draw your own conclusions about how my little corner of the world, commercial litigation finance, stacks up with football. (I’m biased, but high-stakes commercial litigation strikes me as far more combative.) From my perspective though, the saying feels pretty spot-on. Complex litigation, after all, is in large part about skill sets, bench strength, and depth. Outcomes turn not only on the merits, but on horsepower. That’s why large companies hire the big, blue-chip law firms. When you can roster an entire team of first-round legal talent, and operate with essentially no salary cap constraints, you’re playing on an entirely different level.
Which is why I’m struck by the persistent, false narrative pushed by opponents of commercial litigation finance, led by the Chamber of Commerce, Lawyers for Civil Justice, and the insurance lobby. In their telling, funders are cast as a massive, shadowy force supposedly distorting the justice system by flooding the zone with outsized sums, secretly quarterbacking cases, dictating strategy, and manipulating proceedings to skew case outcomes.
These criticisms are divorced from reality and advanced for an ulterior motive, one that says a lot about how certain players would prefer the game be played. What these folks actually object to isn’t funders tilting the field; it’s funders leveling it. When both sides have the resources to field real players, the old playbook doesn’t work so well anymore. At that point, cases turn, as they should, on the facts and the law, not on who has more all-stars.
I recently authored a piece examining the objective economic metrics that undercut funding opponents’ claims. In reality, commercial litigation finance is an ultra-niche market: just $2.3 billion in annual commitments, most of which are disbursed incrementally over a number of years. And of that total sum, only $759 million went to contracts with litigants themselves. 1 Commercial funding is of critical importance to those who rely upon it, primarily small and mid-sized businesses that comprise the industry’s core constituency. However, as an industry operating within the broader American legal landscape? Let’s just say the jumbo personnel package, it is not. It’s small. Think Little Giants, not Lombardi’s Packers.
But let’s take the exercise one step further. Beyond the dollars and financial metrics, one of the clearest and most revealing measures of the industry’s actual scale and influence is headcount. By that, I mean how many people actually work in this field? In what positions? And what does that reveal about what commercial funding is, and just as importantly, what it is not?
Here is the reality: the total U.S. commercial funding workforce clocks in at a little north of 300 people spread across roughly 33 funders in total, over half of which have 5 or fewer employees.
To state the obvious, if this skeleton crew really were a shadow coaching staff orchestrating outcomes across the nation’s justice system, those 300 people would have to be logging some truly staggering (and impossible) overtime minutes.
But let’s get into the stats. The myth yields to the math.
The Roster
“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” — W. Edwards Deming.
Point taken. As of the start of Q4 2025, we identified approximately 33 commercial litigation funders operating in the United States.2 That tally includes both pure-play commercial litigation funders and multi-strategy firms with dedicated litigation-finance teams. Notably, not all of these “funders” actually manage committed, discretionary pools of investment capital. Some function more akin to syndicators or brokers, committing limited dollars or facilitating investment by larger funders.
Now, some context. The United States is home to more than 450,000 law firms.3 Compare that to the bare few dozen commercial funding outfits. The scale gap speaks for itself.
And within those 33 commercial funders? The entire U.S. commercial litigation-funding workforce clocks in at about 337 people. In other words, you could fit the whole industry into one section of the bleachers, with plenty of elbow room to spare.
But even that figure is skewed. Burford Capital, perhaps the best-known funder, has more than 60 U.S. employees, about 20% of the entire domestic workforce. Once you control for that outlier, the industry’s true scale comes into focus:
- The median total headcount at U.S. funders? Just 5 people.
- ~52% of funders have 5 or fewer.
- ~76% of funders have 10 or fewer.
So to keep running with the metaphor (because why stop now), most funders don’t even have enough bodies to round out the huddle in a flag-football game.
And keep in mind, a lot of those 300-something employees aren’t managing investments. Many are in origination, investor relations, or back-office, operational, or administrative roles, performing the basic blocking and tackling required to run any investment-management business. The team members who actually monitor ongoing litigation are an even smaller positional group within an already lean roster.
The Depth Chart
“Where there’s a will, there’s a lawyer.” Pardon the trifecta of dad joke, lawyer humor, and bad pun, but it sets up the next series.
To control complex commercial litigation (and have a chance at winning), a funder would need lawyers. Lots of them.
So let’s look at where the actual lawyers in the commercial litigation funding sector fall on the depth chart. Because nuanced roster analysis isn’t just a way to measure scale. It also exposes the emptiness of another favorite claim from opponents: that funders are secretly calling the plays. That’s pure fantasy (football).
The employee directories at funders underscore the point. Of the roughly 300-plus employees in the U.S., only about 204, just 60%, possess a law degree. Break it down further and the depth drops off fast:
- ~50% of funders employ 3 or fewer lawyers.
- ~66% employ 5 or fewer.
- Less than 10 attorneys on staff? Just shy of 80%.
And even those numbers are padded in the program. Many of those J.D.s focus on scouting new business (i.e., origination) or handling in-house legal functions (e.g., transactional attorneys handling contracts and financing instruments). They’re not seasoned trial attorneys capable of diving deep into ongoing cases on a consistent basis, which is what would be required to be in a position to actually make litigation decisions.
The premise I’m driving at is this: Funders don’t have deep rosters of lawyers (a mere ~200 in total industrywide), and the relatively few lawyers they do have are intentionally not positioned to control the game. Which is perfectly fine, of course. Funders succeed through disciplined capital deployment, not by calling plays in the trenches or running with the ball. The line of scrimmage is for the litigators handling the case. That is funders’ business model, by design, and it works.
So that’s the micro perspective, brought to you from inside the players’ locker room, if you will. Step outside for a more macro view, and the true scale of the field comes into focus.
The United States has more than 1.3 million lawyers across hundreds of thousands of firms.4 Next to that, the barely 200 lawyers in all of commercial litigation funding are pretty hard to locate on the depth chart.
Consider, for instance, the Am Law 100, The American Lawyer’s annual ranking of the nation’s top-grossing firms. Collectively, they employ more than ~85,000 U.S. lawyers. A typical Am Law 100 firm, all by itself, has many times more lawyers than work in the entire U.S. commercial litigation finance industry combined. In fact, some of their regional offices, alone, rival or exceed the total number of lawyers working in funding.
Let’s keep the drive going. What about U.S. corporate law departments? Different teams, but the same fully loaded rosters. Among the 100 largest employers of in-house attorneys in the United States, large-cap corporations (say those with $20 billion-plus in annual revenues) employ in-house legal teams with a median of 92 attorneys. Mid-caps average around 37. And across the top-100, these companies roster an average of 149 attorneys each.5
To put that in even clearer perspective, the 10 largest corporate legal departments employ more lawyers than the total number of people (lawyers and non-lawyers combined) working across all commercial litigation funders in the United States. And each of the top 20 corporate law departments individually staffs more lawyers than there are across the entire litigation-funding industry.6 These behemoth corporate players resemble standalone law firms in their own right. And when they take the field, they’re teamed up with the Am Law 100.
So how, exactly, could funders, with a league-wide size of ~200 lawyers, spread thin across a few dozen firms, possibly be calling plays, coordinating outcomes, and distorting the legal system? Especially when set against the sheer magnitude of American civil litigation, which every year includes hundreds of thousands of federal civil filings, millions more in state courts, and a vast additional docket in private arbitrations?7
And, of course, the premise of untoward control runs headlong into a bedrock principle of legal ethics, which is that lawyers take instruction solely from their clients. Funding agreements back the line, expressly disclaiming any right of funders to control litigation strategy or settlement decisions. Courts provide yet more protection. Protective orders, routinely entered in complex civil litigation, bar third parties (like funders) from accessing the very information they’d need if they were actually trying to quarterback a case. The litigating attorneys protect the pocket, as they face game- or career-ending penalties if these orders were violated. So even if funders wanted to be play-callers (they don’t), they’d be doing so without a proper playbook, scouting report, or game film.
Not exactly a sound offensive strategy. It’s a good way to lose, often and big. Thus, even setting aside for discussion purposes the strict prohibitions against control, there’s a very practical reason it isn’t happening. (Speaking as a longtime Giants season ticketholder, I’ve spent the past decade studying losing strategy up close, so trust me on this one.)
The Final Score
We started this discussion with the horses, so let’s end there too. Funders don’t have them, at least not in the way opponents would have you believe.
And that’s precisely the point. The commercial litigation finance industry’s roster isn’t built to move the chains. Funders’ teams are intentionally lean, structured to deploy capital efficiently into meritorious litigation and generate strong investment returns. In doing so, they provide critical assistance to litigants who otherwise lack the financial means to have their fair day in court.
Put differently, funders are capital providers. Boosters, in a sense, but not play-callers, quarterbacks, or offensive coordinators. Any claim to the contrary is a ball fake designed to mislead policymakers into further favoring big corporate interests.
To suggest otherwise isn’t analysis, it’s blown coverage. And chasing the misdirection? That’s not the smart-money play.
Footnotes
1 William Weisman, Market Perspective: What Is the True Size of the Commercial Litigation Funding Industry?,
Nat’l L. Rev. (Aug. 13, 2025), https://natlawreview.com/article/market-perspective-what-true-size-commercial-
litigation-funding-industry.
2 Firm and headcount statistics discussed herein are derived from author’s analysis of publicly available information, including firm websites, professional biographies, LinkedIn profiles, and industry directories, to identify U.S.-based
personnel as of Q4 2025.
3 Statista Research Dep’t, Number of Law Firms in the United States from 2012 to 2025, Statista,
https://www.statista.com/statistics/822025/us-legal-services-market-law-firms/
4 Am. Bar Ass’n, Profile of the Legal Profession: Demographics, Am. Bar Ass’n (2024),
https://www.americanbar.org/news/profile-legal-
profession/demographics/#:~:text=There%20are%20more%20than%201.3,1970%20to%20574%2C000%20in%201
980.
5 See LawCrossing, Top 100 In-House Legal Employers (2025), https://www.lawcrossing.com/top-100-inhouse-
legal-employers.php/. Average number of in-house attorneys calculation excludes figures for the U.S. Department
of State, U.S. Department of Justice, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
6 Id.
7 Administrative Office of the United States Courts, Federal Judicial Caseload Statistics 2024,
https://www.uscourts.gov/data-news/reports/statistical-reports/federal-judicial-caseload-statistics/federal-judicial-
caseload-statistics-2024; The Pew Charitable Trusts, How Many Cases—and What Kind—Do State and Local
Courts Handle?; Am. Arbitration Ass’n (AAA), 2024 ADR Data by Practice Area; JAMS, JAMS Resolution Report
2024 (2024).
All of the views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of The National Law Review.
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