Lake Whillans Analyzes Potential Impact of GAO Report

In December of last year, the GAO published its report on third-party litigation finance, detailing the current trends and characteristics of the industry in the U.S. The report aimed to provide a much-needed resource of publicly available data on the market, and examine the potential policy implications of its result, which has led to industry commentators looking to analyze what, if any, impact the report will have.

In a new piece of analysis by Lake Whillans on Above The Law, the GAO report is praised as being ‘a generally helpful and balanced overview of the state of the funding industry’, both in terms of providing a factual resource, as well as its value to future policy discussions. Importantly, the analysis notes that while this report came about due to the requests of legislators at the federal level, the actual findings of the report avoid dictating any prescriptive regulatory recommendations. This stands in stark contrast to the European Union’s Voss Report.

Regarding the potential impact of the report, this article suggests that the report will be a disappointment to those parties looking for ‘ammunition’ to bolster their calls for increased disclosure requirements, and that it instead demonstrates the US regulatory structure as being broadly aligned with other prominent jurisdictions. Lake Whillans argues that the most notable aspect of the report are its findings on the lack of publicly available and accurate data, which may prove beneficial by incentivizing other industry bodies and third-party organizations to increase their research into the litigation funding industry.