How a U.S. Chamber campaign acquired a British name and turned the failure of a retail debt issuer into an argument against litigation funding
On 20 August the Financial Conduct Authority warned consumers about unregulated loan notes and mini-bonds, citing the failure of Woodville Consultants, a litigation funder that had raised retail capital through loan notes. Fair Civil Justice responded by saying that the litigation funding market “cannot remain unregulated”.[1]
That response is opportunism, not mere imprecision.
Woodville’s investors did not enter into litigation funding agreements. They bought debt issued through unregulated loan notes. The FCA warned about the promotion of high-risk securities to retail investors, the activities of unregulated introducers, investor self-certification, hidden commissions and the absence of ordinary regulatory protection. It did not say that the investors lost money because litigation funders are unregulated.
Fair Civil Justice took the failure of an unregulated retail debt issuer and repackaged it as evidence against the industry in which the issuer invested. That goes well beyond a minor category error. It is the use of a real investor loss to advance a predetermined campaign against a different market.
If a company raised unregulated retail debt to invest in property, renewable energy or cryptocurrency and then failed, the first question would be how its bonds were issued, promoted and sold. It would not follow that the underlying industry required regulation. Putting the words “litigation funder” before Woodville’s name does not change that analysis.
Fair Civil Justice presents itself as an authoritative consumer and business voice in the British debate. Its intervention on Woodville was campaign messaging attached to an FCA warning that did not establish what the campaign said it established. Where the campaign itself comes from is the wider question.
The wrong market
A litigation funder ordinarily provides non-recourse capital for a legal claim in return for a contingent payment if the claim succeeds. A loan-note investor lends money to an issuing company for a stated term and promised return. The risks, contractual rights and regulatory questions are different.
Debt is an uncomfortable match for litigation assets. A bond has a maturity date. Litigation does not. Cases can settle early, run for years or produce no return at all. An issuer that promises fixed payments against uncertain and illiquid recoveries assumes a duration and liquidity risk that does not arise in the same form under conventional non-recourse funding.
The FCA’s warning addresses the risks created when high-risk debt instruments are issued by unregulated companies and promoted to retail investors. It identified unregulated introducers taking large fees or commissions, investor self-certification, unauthorised financial promotions and unclear fees or hidden conflicts. It warned that affected investors are unlikely to be able to complain to the Financial Ombudsman Service or claim through the Financial Services Compensation Scheme unless they dealt with an authorised person.[1] Those are questions of securities issuance, financial promotion and retail investor protection.
Regulation of litigation funders would not, by itself, answer any of them. Capital-adequacy rules for funders might reduce the risk that a funder abandons a claimant midway through a case. Controls on funder influence might protect the claimant’s conduct of proceedings. Neither tells a retail investor whether a loan note was properly promoted, whether its promised return was sustainable or whether fixed-term debt was appropriate capital for assets of uncertain duration.
A paper from 2016
In April 2016 the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform published “Before the Flood: An Outline of Oversight Options for Third Party Litigation Funding in England & Wales”, prepared for it by Ken Daly and Steven Pitt of Sidley Austin. The paper observed that the sixteen largest funders in the United Kingdom held around £1.5 billion in assets under management globally, that the sector lacked government oversight and that allowing the practice to become “a dominant interest in litigated cases will distort justice”.[2]
In June 2024 Fair Civil Justice published “Establishing Fairness in Litigation Funding”, its principal policy paper on litigation funding, cited four times in the European Commission’s mapping study on third-party funding. Its opening pages carry a single sentence of provenance. “This paper is a thorough update of a paper initially published in 2016 by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform.”[3]
The campaign’s central British policy document is, on its own account, an American document brought up to date. Nor did that campaign begin in 2016. ILR published “A Gift from America to Europe” in February 2008, “Tort Lawyers Set Their Sights on Britain” in March 2010 and “Hey UK, Don’t Follow in Our Footsteps on Collective Actions” in December 2018.[4]
The board
Fair Civil Justice says it was established in December 2022. Fair Civil Justice Limited, company number 16455941, was incorporated on 19 May 2025 as a private company limited by guarantee, registered at the London office of CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang LLP.[5] Six directors were appointed on the day of incorporation and none has resigned.
One of them is David Meyerson, ILR’s Executive Director, International Initiatives, whose correspondence address on the register is 1615 H Street NW, Washington DC, the headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Companies House records it as his only British directorship. The others are Seema Kennedy OBE, the campaign’s Executive Director, Adrian Dally of the Finance & Leasing Association, Duncan Edwards of BritishAmerican Business, Andrew Mills of Experian and the British Chambers of Commerce as a corporate director.[6]
Fair Civil Justice announced the new structure on 16 June 2025, describing the founding members as “the British Chambers of Commerce, US Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform, BritishAmerican Business, the Finance and Leasing Association and European Justice Forum”. Stephen Waguespack, ILR’s President, was quoted in the same release saying the campaign’s work “has never been more urgent as the claimants’ bar and litigation funders seek to expand some of the worst practices of the U.S. class action system to the UK”.[7]
Asked on its own website who funds it, the campaign answers that it “is funded by our supporters, which includes a diverse number of British businesses and trade bodies”. No amounts are published. Its first accounts, made up to 31 December 2025 and filed on 21 August 2026, were filed in filleted form. No profit and loss account was therefore delivered and no income figure is disclosed. The notes record five employees and say the company “derives the majority of its revenue from voluntary donations received in support of its activities”.[8]
That is a double standard, not merely a tension. Fair Civil Justice demands disclosure from litigation funders of the funder’s identity, the beneficial ownership of foreign-owned funders, the source of the funder’s money and, in appropriate circumstances, the funding agreement itself.[9] Asked who funds its own work, it refers to an unspecified “diverse number” of supporters. Its public accounts disclose neither its income nor the amounts contributed by individual supporters. Its documents disclose connections, memberships and voluntary donations, but not who supplied how much of the money behind the campaign.
The legal disclosure regimes are not identical. That does not remove the inconsistency. Fair Civil Justice’s case against litigation funding rests in substantial part on the proposition that financial interests capable of influencing legal proceedings should be visible. The public is not told who supplied how much of the money behind Fair Civil Justice’s own attempt to influence litigation-funding policy. That may comply with the law. It does not meet the spirit of the transparency the campaign demands of others. Transparency is not a principle if it applies only to the people whose activities you oppose.
On the register
Seema Kennedy has been entered on the statutory Register of Consultant Lobbyists in her own name since 25 September 2024, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform as a declared client, while serving as Executive Director of Fair Civil Justice. CMS registered as a consultant lobbyist on 4 April 2023 and declared ILR as a client from the fourth quarter of that year. In the fourth quarter of 2025 it declared both Fair Civil Justice and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Kendal Advisory Limited registered on 25 July 2024 and declared ILR. A search of the published returns for 2016 to 2022 found no entry naming the Chamber, ILR or Fair Civil Justice. The last previous entries were Westbourne Communications in 2015.[10]
None of that indicates any failure of compliance. The register catches consultant lobbyists acting for third parties. An organisation lobbying in its own name is not required to appear on it at all. What the register does is record who is acting for whom.
The same campaign in Brussels
The European Justice Forum, a Belgian association formed in 2005 and based in Square de Meeûs, lists twelve members including ILR, CMS, Experian, Johnson & Johnson, Bayer, Sanofi, Chubb, Swiss Re and Zurich. Two of Fair Civil Justice’s five individual directors, David Meyerson and Andrew Mills, sit on its board. The Forum’s own entry in the EU Transparency Register declares its membership of Fair Civil Justice.[11]
The Chamber’s declared European lobbying costs have risen from €550,000 for 2019 to €1,750,000 for 2024 and to the €3,000,000 to €3,499,999 band for 2025. Third-party litigation funding sits on its declared list of targeted files, alongside the Representative Actions Directive and the Justice for Growth initiative. Sidley Austin, which prepared the 2016 British paper, is among its declared intermediaries. Those figures cover the Chamber’s declared European lobbying activity as a whole. The register does not allocate expenditure to individual policy files.[12] On 21 January 2026 thirteen business associations including ILR and the European Justice Forum signed a renewed call for “proportionate, binding EU-level rules on professional TPLF”.[13]
Taken together, this is not the story of an independent British campaign that happened to discover concerns also held in Washington. The policy paper identifies itself as an update of an ILR publication. An ILR executive sits on the board. ILR is a founding member. The campaign’s Executive Director has declared ILR as a lobbying client. The same organisations and individuals appear in the related Brussels campaign.
Fair Civil Justice is entitled to advocate the U.S. Chamber’s position. It is not entitled to insulation from scrutiny because that position is presented through a British campaign bearing the language of fairness, consumers and transparency. The media and policymakers should not treat the provenance and the financial interests behind it as incidental. They are central to understanding the campaign.
The evidence loop
The number Fair Civil Justice leads with is £18 billion, taken from a June 2025 paper by the European Centre for International Political Economy which Legal Futures and the Law Society Gazette report was funded by the campaign. The paper contains no funding disclosure of its own. Its derivation is set out in Annex 4. The authors take the cost and compensation associated with the United States tort system, measured by an ILR study as 2.1 per cent of American GDP, assume that the equivalent British figure might be 10, 20 or 30 per cent of the American rate and apply those percentages to British GDP of £2.8 trillion. The resulting estimates are £5.9 billion, £11.9 billion and £17.9 billion. The £18 billion headline is therefore the highest of three scenarios rather than an observed cost. The scenario percentages are assumptions rather than empirically calibrated estimates. The authors chose them “based on a comparison of the legal and institutional frameworks in the UK and the US and on discussions with legal experts”. No experts are named.[14]
The headline British figure is therefore an American figure translated through the authors’ highest assumed coefficient. There is a more fundamental problem with the comparator. The ILR measure includes judgments, settlements and legal and administrative costs, together with liability insurance expenditure. ECIPE itself acknowledges that the US estimate includes compensation and that using it may overestimate the increase in British litigation costs. As Beverley Robertson of the Class Representatives Network put it in the Gazette, “settlements are not a cost to the economy. They just transfer money from one party to another.” Her verdict on the ILR study is that “the problem is not so much that the numbers are wrong, as that they are counting the wrong thing”.[15]
This is the figure Fair Civil Justice places at the front of its campaign. It is the highest output from three assumed scenarios, built from an American measure that includes compensation and translated through a coefficient selected by the authors. The paper identifies no observed British loss on that scale and does not measure a British cost of £18 billion. It generates the headline by applying that assumption to an American comparator. It is a campaign number.
Challenged on the paper, ECIPE’s director cited CMS’s European Class Action Report as corroboration. CMS is the firm at whose office Fair Civil Justice is registered. Its partner Kenny Henderson co-signed the campaign’s submission to the Civil Justice Council and appears in Appendix C of the Council’s final report as “Legal Adviser, Fair Civil Justice; Partner, CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro”. CMS says the report “is entirely a product of our own detailed research across several European jurisdictions”.[16]
The claimant they cite
Fair Civil Justice’s About page states that in the Post Office Horizon scandal “the lawyers and funders took home 80 per cent”. The £46 million figure appears in the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee’s 2020 report. The outcome for the 555 was a scandal in its own right. The description of that entire amount as money the lawyers and funder took home conflates legal costs, repayment of deployed capital and funder profit. The International Legal Finance Association and the Association of Litigation Funders told the Civil Justice Council that ILR’s near-80 per cent figure was wrong because it treats the reimbursement of the funder’s capital as profit.[17] No public breakdown appears to identify Therium’s profit separately from the capital it deployed and the legal costs paid from the settlement.
Nor does the campaign quote the claimant. Sir Alan Bates wrote in the Guardian on 10 May 2024 that his victory was “being twisted by those who don’t want to see its like again” and that without funding “there would have been no justice for sub-postmasters”. Lord Arbuthnot told the House of Lords that “the bloody doors would not have been blown off, had it not been for the availability of litigation funding”. By 26 June 2026 the redress schemes established in the aftermath of the scandal exposed by that litigation had paid approximately £1.628 billion to more than 12,900 claimants.[18]
What the campaign has achieved
The Government responded to the Civil Justice Council on 17 December 2025 by accepting what it described as the Council’s two primary recommendations and saying that it would consider the wider recommendations after implementing them. It undertook to confirm, with prospective effect only, that funding agreements are not damages-based agreements and to introduce proportionate regulation, legislating when parliamentary time allows. The King’s Speech of 13 May 2026 contained no litigation funding bill. No consultation on the design of that regulation has been published and no bill is before either House.[19] Three years after PACCAR the market still relies on restructured agreements and developing case law rather than a statutory solution.
Regulation of litigation funding is a legitimate subject for debate. This article is not an argument for leaving the market untouched. Funders should be adequately capitalised, transparent about their identity and prevented from controlling proceedings. The Civil Justice Council said so at length.
But regulation cannot be built on category errors, imported campaign material and numbers that acquire authority through repetition rather than measurement.
The FCA used Woodville to illustrate the danger of raising retail money through unregulated high-risk debt. It did not identify the absence of litigation-funder regulation as the cause of investor loss. Fair Civil Justice took that warning and redirected it at its chosen target. That was opportunism, not analysis.
The same pattern runs through the wider campaign. Its principal British policy paper is expressly an update of a U.S. Chamber publication. Its board and founding membership connect it directly to ILR. Its £18 billion headline is the highest result of an assumed scenario derived from an American comparator. Its account of Horizon ignores the claimant whose case it invokes and conflates capital repayment with profit. It demands financial transparency from litigation funders while declining to disclose the amounts contributed by its own supporters.
Fair Civil Justice is entitled to campaign. It is not entitled to exemption from scrutiny because an established American lobbying programme is presented under a reassuring British name.
For too long, much of this has passed without serious examination. The documents were public. The connections were registered. The provenance was printed on the opening page. The failure was one of willingness to look, not of available evidence. That should now change.
Notes
- Financial Conduct Authority, “Consumers warned to beware of risky mini-bonds and loan notes”, 20 August 2026
FCA – Consumers warned to beware of risky mini-bonds and loan notes - Institute for Legal Reform, “Before the Flood: An Outline of Oversight Options for Third Party Litigation Funding in England & Wales”, April 2016
Institute for Legal Reform – Before the Flood - Fair Civil Justice, “Establishing Fairness in Litigation Funding”, June 2024
Fair Civil Justice – Establishing Fairness in Litigation Funding [PDF] - Institute for Legal Reform, press releases/commentary, 2008, 2010 and 2018
- Companies House, Fair Civil Justice Limited, company number 16455941
Companies House – Fair Civil Justice filing history - Companies House, register of officers; directors’ roles
Companies House – Fair Civil Justice officers
For David Meyerson’s ILR position:
Institute for Legal Reform – David Meyerson
The FCJ announcement identifying the founding organisations and roles:
Fair Civil Justice – CLG announcement - Fair Civil Justice, “Fair Civil Justice Forms CLG to Drive UK Justice Reform”, 16 June 2025
Fair Civil Justice – Fair Civil Justice Forms CLG to Drive UK Justice Reform - Fair Civil Justice FAQ; Companies House accounts
Fair Civil Justice – Frequently Asked Questions
Companies House – Fair Civil Justice filing history - Fair Civil Justice, Establishing Fairness in Litigation Funding – disclosure proposals
Fair Civil Justice – Establishing Fairness in Litigation Funding [PDF] - Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists – registrant lists and quarterly returns
- European Justice Forum – membership, board and EU Transparency Register information
European Justice Forum – About Us, Board and Members
The organisation also publishes its EU Transparency Register number here:
European Justice Forum – Imprint and Transparency Register details - EU Transparency Register – U.S. Chamber of Commerce, registration no. 483024821178-51
A U.S. Chamber filing confirming that exact EU Transparency Registration Number is available here:
U.S. Chamber of Commerce – EU filing [PDF]
I would ideally hyperlink the actual Transparency Register entry in the final published article rather than this corroborating document if you already have the entry URL. - “Renewed Call for Proportionate EU-level Action on Professional Third-Party Litigation Funding”, 21 January 2026
Insurance Europe – Joint statement on professional third-party litigation funding - ECIPE Occasional Paper 06/2025, “The Impact of Increased Mass Litigation in the UK”
ECIPE – The Impact of Increased Mass Litigation in the UK [PDF]
The accompanying ECIPE release is also useful:
ECIPE – Press release on the report [PDF] - Beverley Robertson, “Does mass litigation really harm the economy?”, Law Society Gazette, 30 September 2025
Law Society Gazette – Does mass litigation really harm the economy? - Fredrik Erixon, Global Legal Post, 15 September 2025; Civil Justice Council report; CMS response
Global Legal Post – The economic consequences of the UK’s unchecked rise in mass litigation are real
Civil Justice Council – Review of Litigation Funding: Final Report [PDF] - Neil Purslow for ILFA and ALF, response to the Civil Justice Council consultation, January 2025
Civil Justice Council – Neil Purslow, ILFA and ALF submission [PDF] - Sir Alan Bates; Lord Arbuthnot; Department for Business and Trade Post Office redress data
The Guardian – Sir Alan Bates: Our Post Office victory is being twisted by those who don’t want to see its like again
UK Parliament – Lord Arbuthnot, Litigation Funding Agreements Bill debate, 29 April 2024 [PDF]
GOV.UK – Post Office Horizon financial redress data as of 26 June 2026 - Written Ministerial Statements HLWS1189/HCWS1192; King’s Speech, 13 May 2026
UK Parliament – Third-Party Litigation Funding, Written Ministerial Statement, 17 December 2025
GOV.UK – The King’s Speech 2026
GOV.UK – King’s Speech 2026 background briefing notes
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