Miller UK Ltd. v. Caterpillar, Inc. is widely regarded as one of the first major U.S. cases in which a plaintiff openly relied on litigation financing and had that arrangement tested in court. Miller, a small English family-owned company, sued Caterpillar for breach of contract and trade secret misappropriation; after an eight-week trial, a jury awarded Miller $74.6 million.
During discovery, Caterpillar sought production of Miller's litigation funding agreement and its communications with funders, arguing the arrangement was impermissible under Illinois's old criminal champerty and maintenance statute. In a widely cited 2014 opinion, Magistrate Judge Jeffrey Cole rejected that argument, holding that Miller's use of litigation financing did not constitute the kind of "officious intermeddling" the maintenance doctrine was meant to prevent.
The court also held that work product protection was not waived by sharing case materials with funders under a non-disclosure agreement, so long as Miller maintained a reasonable expectation of confidentiality. Nearly every subsequent U.S. case addressing discoverability of funder communications has drawn on Miller's reasoning to shield those materials, making it one of the foundational precedents of the modern American litigation finance industry.