Litigation funding in Europe after LitFinCon.

On 7 and 8 October 2026, Amsterdam hosted the first European edition of LitFinCon, a conference devoted to litigation funding, and Hello Justice attended. Speakers described a growing market, governed by national rules, whose main risk remains the length of proceedings. For France, we draw two conclusions. Cases with €100,000 to €1 million at stake remain underserved, and handling individual cases as a series avoids several of the difficulties of collective actions.

The Amsterdam conference.

Organised by Siltstone Capital, the LitFinCon series began in Houston and made its first European stop in Amsterdam. One day focused mainly on law, the other on finance. Participants came from some fifteen countries, according to the organisers. The European and the international associations of litigation funders were represented.

A market with national rules.

Several speakers acknowledged that the European market is still a long way behind the US market, and that its size is hard to measure. In 2021 the European Parliament estimated that litigation funding accounted for 0.8% of a €125bn European legal market Source [1]. The United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany were presented as the main European markets. Spain and Italy were among those described as growing, as was Portugal for consumer claims.

No European text governs litigation funding as a whole. Directive (EU) 2020/1828 covers only the funding of consumer representative actions Source [2]. The study the European Commission published on 21 March 2025 sets out three approaches without choosing one Source [3]. In Amsterdam, one panel questioned whether the directive had fundamentally changed the funding of collective actions.

In the United Kingdom, the PACCAR ruling handed down by the Supreme Court on 26 July 2023 called into question the form of agreements linked to the sums recovered Source [4]. In June 2025 the Civil Justice Council recommended legislation to reverse it Source [5]. According to speakers, agreements there have been rewritten to pay the funder a multiple of its investment, and the announced reform has yet to materialise. Some funders said they had given up on collective actions in London, which in their view have become too costly and too risky.

In the Netherlands, the WAMCA act has governed collective actions since 1 January 2020, with the court reviewing the representativeness and the funding of the entity bringing the action Source [6]. The Dutch practitioners present described how slow and costly these actions are: before the merits are reached, the group has to be assembled and the action declared admissible.

In Germany, the collective actions act, in force since 13 October 2023, makes an action inadmissible if its funder has been promised more than 10% of the performance owed, or can be expected to influence the case to the detriment of consumers Source [7]. That cap was presented as a brake on the funding of consumer actions.

The length of proceedings and insurance.

From one panel to the next, duration came back as the main risk in the business. The funders present said as much: funded cases often last longer than expected when the funding was agreed. A case that drags on ties up the funder’s capital, and the law firm handling it can run short of cash before the end.

Deal structures have adapted to this risk. More transactions now cover portfolios of cases, or the funding of a law firm. Others consist of advancing money against a decision already handed down, which the trade calls monetisation.

Insurance covers the costs the other side would claim if the case were lost, and increasingly the capital committed to a portfolio of cases. Some policies guarantee that investors get their capital back by a set date, which limits how long their money is committed. Speakers pointed out that a policy is no substitute for reviewing the cases, and that an insurer also assesses the quality of the lawyers.

This cover for adverse costs developed in England, where the losing party pays a large share of the winning party’s costs. It remains rare in Germany, where these costs follow a statutory scale. In France, the losing party is in principle ordered to pay the court costs Source [8]. The court may also order it to pay a sum it sets under article 700 of the Code of Civil Procedure.

What institutional investors expect.

The capital that funds litigation has changed: it increasingly comes from private credit, public institutions, life insurers and pension funds. Dutch pension schemes had come to learn more, according to the organisers.

These investors want to know when their capital will come back to them. Like insurers, they also look at the correlation between the cases in a portfolio. When cases depend on the same legal question, they can be won or lost together. Managers with a credit background warned their peers. Whatever the form of the contract, the risk of a lawsuit is closer to that of an equity investment than to that of a loan.

Funders are more willing to take on a case whose damages are assessed realistically and whose weaknesses are set out from the start. Since the decision to settle belongs to the client, they say they need to know the client as well as the lawyer. One of them expressed strong reservations about volume deals, where a firm wants to multiply its cases within a few months. Hello Justice’s Swiss franc loan programme, like any series of cases, has to meet that standard.

One panel dealt with artificial intelligence. Those who spoke about it most precisely use it to speed up the review of a case and to find its blind spots. For them, the tool helps the lawyer and the funder decide faster, without making the outcome of a lawsuit certain. Among lawyers, what held back its use was professional secrecy and the confidentiality of documents.

France and mid‑market litigation.

The funders who spoke about France already fund cases there, commercial cases in particular. They consider its potential greater than the activity they see there. One of them finds it more cautious than its neighbours.

Under French law, a litigation funding agreement rests on freedom of contract and on the lawyer’s professional rules. The Versailles Court of Appeal recognised its validity on 1 June 2006 Source [9]. Article 16 of the Act of 30 April 2025 is the first French statute to refer expressly to third‑party funding, for group actions Source [10]. Decree no. 2025-1191 of 10 December 2025 sets out the related disclosure rules Source [11]. Neither text governs an individual case. In such a case, the lawyer runs the proceedings and takes instructions only from their client Source [12]. Our guide to litigation funding in France sets out this framework.

Cases with €100,000 to €1 million at stake remain outside the reach of the large international funders. Burford Capital, one of the listed funders, targets cases of at least $5m, according to its publications Source [13]. The middle of the market, as the European funders present described it, sits well above this segment.

Yet the small cases of continental Europe were described as an opportunity for those who know how to handle them. The condition came up several times. A small case takes almost as much work as a large one, and reviewing it must cost little to stay proportionate to what is at stake. This is Hello Justice’s segment: it is the first French company dedicated to mid‑market litigation funding, from €100,000 at stake.

When the same practice has harmed many people, their cases can be handled as a series, without a group action. The legal analysis and the standard documents then serve the whole series, which reduces the cost of each case. Each client keeps their own lawyer, agreement and documents. Their case moves forward without waiting for a group to be formed, and what the court awards them does not have to be shared out among other claimants. These are two of the difficulties attributed to collective actions in Amsterdam. Our article on serial litigation describes this other route.

This route has a drawback that insurers know: similar cases share the same law, and a reversal of case law can affect them together. The Swiss franc loan cases funded by Hello Justice depend on the Cour de cassation rulings of 9 July 2025, recent case law, liable to change Source [14]. One opens unfair‑terms protection to borrowers paid in Swiss francs. The other, handed down the same day, upholds the clause of a bank that had informed its client clearly. Each case is therefore reviewed on its own documents.

Hello Justice’s method.

Hello Justice has more than 600 live cases, taken on since 2024. A specialised partner lawyer analyses the eligibility of each case: the features of the dispute, the limitation period, the completeness of the documents and the reasonable prospects of success. Not every case is accepted.

To keep this review proportionate to what is at stake, Hello Justice has built its own tools. In the Swiss franc loan programme, its simulator recalculates each instalment of a loan at the official European Central Bank rates and at the interest rates set by the contract. It then checks the result against the lines of the bank’s amortisation schedule, and ACTIVE AVOCATS, a firm of the COGEP AVOCATS group, relies on this calculation to quantify the claim. The pace of the programme also hinges on the capacity of the law firms that conduct the proceedings, a risk we set out for investors. For other disputes, Hello Justice delivers a written report and a funding opinion before signing. The opinion sets out what argues for the case and what argues against it.

If your company, or your client’s, has a dispute worth at least €100,000 against a solvent opposing party, you can test its eligibility, then submit the case. The test and the submission are free of charge. Outside the Swiss franc loan programme, if you request funding, the case analysis costs €1,500 excluding VAT (€1,800 including VAT), whatever the opinion. If the case is funded, Hello Justice pays the lawyer’s fees. Its commission, from 14 to 30% including VAT of the sums recovered, is due only in the event of success. The procedural indemnity under article 700 is dealt with in the agreement, and nothing is owed to Hello Justice if the case fails. A Swiss franc loan? Checking it is free, and the programme has its own terms.

If you are an investor, the investors page presents the fund that Hello Justice manages and the process for accessing its documentation. The risks page sets out what can cause a case to be lost or delay its outcome.