Litigation Funding in Canada
It is hard to miss the fact that litigation funding is undergoing exponential growth internationally and now constitutes a multi-billion dollar global industry. In the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States funding of both individual claims and class or group actions is now commonplace. Increasing liberalization of both civil litigation and arbitration regimes in other jurisdictions continues to open a greater number of jurisdictions to the possibility of funding. Changes in the law in Hong Kong and Singapore since 2018 permit third-party funding in respect of international arbitration and in 2021 Singapore further liberalized, permitting third-party funding of domestic arbitration and proceedings in the Singapore International Commercial Court (SICC). Coupled with greater awareness of the many advantages of funding amongst both attorneys and clients and combined with a greater number of sophisticated providers of litigation finance, litigation funding is now part of the discussion around how proceedings should be financed in many cases.
Canada is no exception to this trend; judicial treatment of funding is increasingly favorable and contingency fee arrangements are being used by the Canadian bar with greater frequency, paving the way to greater access to justice for all Canadian plaintiffs.
Our recently published whitepaper, Litigation Funding in Canada, explores the benefits of funding for both lawyers and their clients, while also addressing the growing body of Canadian jurisprudence around funding for both class actions and single-party commercial cases.
You can read the whitepaper online here or you can download the PDF here.
