Rejoice! On 19 March the Litigation Funding Agreements (Enforceability) Bill was introduced in the House of Lords (HL Bill 56). Litigation funders and those whom they backed had a fit of the vapours after the Supreme Court judgment last summer in R (on the application of PACCAR Inc and others) v Competition Appeal Tribunal and others [2023] UKSC 28, [2023] 4 All ER 675. By a majority of four to one it decided that litigation funding agreements (LFAs) in which the fees of the funder were calculated by reference to a cut of the damages recovered were in law damages-based agreements (DBAs). The dissentient was Lady Rose, the one member of the court with first-hand experience of the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT), having chaired it from 2005 to 2013, and again from 2015 to 2019.
The best-known case funded in this manner was Bates and others v Post Office Ltd
