Direct Legal Funding history

Another significant move was the legalization of domestic class action lawsuits in Australia in 1992.

Some took that risk, such as IMF Bentham, founded in 2001 (today, its United States entity is similarly referred to as “Bentham IMF”) to finance both class actions and single cases.

In 2005 that same court found that “[s]uch funding will leave the claimant as the party primarily interested in the result of the litigation and the party in control of the conduct of the litigation.” In other words, the funder is not allowed to commandeer the case—the client must retain control.

At a certain point, funders went out on a limb and just started funding other types of cases in hopes that it would be allowed until eventually the court had to deal with the question in 2006.

Express Legal Funding was founded in Lubbock, Texas, on January 19, 2015.

According to the group’s cofounder Ralph Sutton, it was the first commercial litigation funding group in the United States. “A few years later, the financial crisis made a global bank the wrong place for a litigation funder to call home,” he wrote in a 2018 article.

Momentum Funding, LawCash, and Ardec Funding together make up Legal Business Services, LLC, which was created in September 2019.

But we’ve done a deep dive into the ins and outs of Direct Legal Funding and placed it at number five on our list of Top Lawsuit Loan Companies in the United States in 2021—and for good reasons.