Years of attempts to comprehensively regulate third-party litigation funding at the federal level have gone nowhere, stuck in the same disclosure-versus-confidentiality stalemate covered elsewhere in this library. In a 2025 Northwestern University Law Review article, “Preventive Transparency in Third-Party Litigation Funding,” law professor Seth Katsuya Endo proposes a narrower way through: rather than arguing for what disclosure policy should look like from first principles, the article asks what current law, federal civil procedure and professional-responsibility rules already on the books, requires, and works out the implications for funding transparency from there.
The resulting proposal is deliberately modest. Grounding the analysis in the federal judicial disqualification statute and nationally uniform professional-conduct rules, Endo argues litigants should, at minimum, be required to disclose, in camera, to the judge, not necessarily to opposing counsel or the public, both the existence of any third-party funding agreement and any provision giving the funder control over the litigation. That is a meaningfully narrower ask than the public, filed-of-record disclosure sought by the pending federal bills covered elsewhere in this library: it protects the confidentiality funders and claimants generally want, while still giving a judge the visibility needed to police the specific conflict-of-interest and independence concerns those existing ethics rules already exist to catch.
The timing is notable. The article was published as the federal judiciary's own Advisory Committee on Civil Rules agreed, for the first time, to take up litigation funding disclosure as a potential subject for a new procedural rule, meaning a doctrinally modest proposal like this one, built from rules already in force rather than new legislation, may be a more realistic near-term path to some form of federal disclosure than the more sweeping bills currently stalled in Congress.