Our article on attorney independence covers the ethics rule, Rule 5.4(c) and its state analogues, that formally bars a funder from directing litigation strategy. What the rule does not resolve is the underlying governance problem it was written to contain. In her 2015 Notre Dame Law Review article "Incorporating Legal Claims," Maya Steinitz argued that nearly every hard problem litigation finance produces is a version of one classic corporate governance issue: the separation of ownership from control. Once a funder holds an economic stake in an outcome it does not direct, the claimant's formal authority over the case and the funder's financial interest in how it resolves can quietly pull apart, even when every individual actor is behaving in good faith.
Steinitz's more recent work sharpens the worst-case version of that drift. Her paper "Zombie Litigation: Claim Aggregation, Litigant Autonomy, and Funders' Intermeddling," forthcoming in the Cornell Law Review, coins the term to describe a governance failure in which real control over a claim migrates away from the claimant toward funders and attorneys acting less like advisors and more like asset managers, with the nominal plaintiff technically still in charge but functionally along for the ride. She situates the risk within the growth of aggregate and portfolio funding, structures where a single funder holds stakes across many claims at once and has every incentive to manage the portfolio rather than any single client's individual outcome.
The practical guardrail for a claimant is to read a funding agreement specifically for what it reserves to you: settlement approval authority, control over litigation strategy, and the ability to change counsel, rather than assuming those rights survive by default just because the funder is not formally your attorney. It is also worth asking, directly, how the party helping you evaluate a claim is compensated. A flat fee agreed in advance, paid regardless of whether funding is ultimately offered or accepted, keeps that party's incentives aligned with getting the analysis right rather than with steering you toward any particular funder or deal structure, which is precisely the kind of structural answer this literature calls for.