By Jamaal Summerlin, Founder of CaseFin

Many firms underestimate what it takes to secure funding for their clients’ cases, and it shows in presentation. A partner emails a funder contact. Attached: a draft complaint, a damages memo, some correspondence. The key facts are scattered. The ask is vague. The funder is left to weigh whether to play Sherlock or move on to the next submission. If you’re a known quantity, they might dig in. Otherwise, you’re competing against cleaner submissions.

Firms have intake processes. Funders have underwriting processes. Both involve structured evaluation, but the inputs and priorities differ.

A firm evaluates a case for litigation merit can we win this, what’s the risk, does it fit our practice? A funder evaluates for return profile what’s the timeline, what are the damages, is the defendant collectible, does this fit our portfolio?

These lenses overlap but aren’t the same. A winnable case can be unfundable, while a fundable case might carry litigation risk a firm would normally avoid but a funder will price in.

The gap is that firms often present cases the way they think about them internally, not the way funders need to evaluate them. That’s where the workflow breaks down.

At the margins, where most submissions live, presentation affects outcomes. Not usually whether a case can be funded, but how quickly it moves forward, how efficiently it is diligenced, and on what terms. Good presentation won’t overcome a case without merit. But strong cases still get delayed, deprioritized, or priced more conservatively when the funder has to do extra diligence work. Signal in either direction comes later than it should.

Why this persists

There is no standard. Every firm packages cases differently. Every funder has a different intake process. Some are highly structured; others are informal. Counsel is expected to navigate each one, often with no clear guidance on what matters most. The burden of translation falls on the side with the least visibility into how the other thinks.

In conversations with funders, I’ve heard a wide range of approaches, but one theme is consistent: no one would turn down better-packaged submissions. The friction is universally acknowledged, even if the solutions vary.

Part of the problem is that funding-readiness has never been treated as a discipline. It’s an afterthought, something counsel handles ad hoc when a case needs capital, not a structured part of case development. There’s no playbook, no shared format, no common language between the two sides of the transaction.

So every submission reinvents the wheel. And every funder spends time reconstructing what could have been surfaced upfront.

Where this is headed

Counsel and funders play distinct roles, and it is unrealistic to expect either side to naturally think the way the other does. But that gap can be narrowed. Counsel now has tools that can surface a funder’s evaluation lens earlier in the process not just by packaging cases more cleanly, but by stress-testing them against the criteria funders actually use. That shifts funding-readiness from an afterthought to a discipline.

The firms that treat funding-readiness as part of their workflow, not a scramble when capital is needed, will close faster, on better terms, with less friction. The ones that don’t will continue to wonder why strong cases stall.

Funding-readiness isn’t a capital problem. It’s a workflow problem. And workflow problems have solutions.