Third-party litigation funding is now a multi-billion-dollar industry, with global investment estimated above $17 billion, yet it remains strikingly opaque: because most funders are privately held, even basic empirical questions about the practice are difficult to answer with precision. That opacity became visible in an unusual way in 2024, when the U.S. Supreme Court itself asked litigants appearing before it how many of the Court's own pending cases were third-party funded, a question that, per University of Utah law professor J. Jonas Anderson's 2026 George Washington Law Review article “Demystifying Third-Party Litigation Funding,” could not be answered with any real precision, even by the Court asking it.
Rather than adding another round of advocacy to the disclosure debate, Anderson's contribution is empirical: the article draws on two federal courts that have actually mandated disclosure of third-party funding in cases before them, the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, and, under its chief judge, the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, to look behind what the article calls the industry's opaque curtain and establish what funded litigation actually looks like where the data exists, rather than relying on the anecdote and advocacy that has otherwise dominated the debate.
The finding matters for how to weigh the rest of this debate: much of the fight over TPLF disclosure, including the pending federal bills covered elsewhere in this library, has been argued in the abstract, by parties with an obvious stake in the outcome. Two courts already generating real disclosure data offer a preview of what broader, state or federal, disclosure requirements might actually reveal, and a way to test the competing claims made about litigation funding's effects against something other than each side's priors.