European Litigation Funding Conference — A Moderator's View

Yesterday (Tuesday 17 May) I had the pleasure of moderating the Enforcement and Monetisation of Awards panel at Brown Rudnick’s first European Litigation Funding Conference, held in Claridge’s ballroom. I was grateful to be joined by such a brilliantly engaging group of panellists:

• Wieger Wielinga, Omni Bridgeway
• Nick Moore, AON Insurance
• Rebecca Dixon, King Street
• Neil Barnett, Istok Associates

I wanted to touch on a few points from yesterday. Enforcement is complex and can be incredibly lengthy and costly.

To enforce a judgment requires know how. Here are three examples:

Firstly, you may have no time to celebrate your win as in some jurisdictions a foreign judgment will not be recognised after two years while in others, it is substantially longer.

Secondly, in some jurisdictions you will have to provide security for costs to enforce your judgement while in others, the court enforcement fee is a percentage of the judgement debt, e.g., 1 percent.

Finally, in many jurisdictions you need at the outset to get jurisdiction (e.g., place of residence or business or agreement) and service right as these are two common reasons for many courts across the world to refuse recognition and enforcement.

You also need to know what tools are in the box to get information, e.g., US 1782. But like all things in life, nothing stays the same. For example, given the growth and use of the blockchain, we are seeing a lot of groundbreaking innovations in the courts of England & Wales to assist enforcement across the blockchain.

After quite a lot of technical debate, our courts have held that cryptoassets are to be regarded as property and the significance of that is they have been willing to 1) freeze such assets and 2) order a third party to provide disclosure re: what assets they hold and post judgment, to transfer them to the judgment creditor.

Our panel gave us answers to some complex questions including:

• What are the main differences between enforcement funding and merits funding including from an investor’s perspective? 
• What does enforcement funding fund?
• The role of the funder?
• How to approach enforcement as a global broker?

A full recording of the conference will be available at the end of the week on our website.