Due Diligence for Litigation Funders

A litigation funder is not only underwriting a claim. It is underwriting the institution that will defend it. The strength of the facts and the quality of the firm matter — but so does who sits on the other side of the table, how that defendant tends to litigate, and whether it will be in a position to pay. That half of the diligence has historically been the hardest to do at portfolio scale. It is exactly the half aggregate market intelligence is built to address.

The defendant is half the underwrite

Funding diligence usually concentrates on the plaintiff's side of the case: liability, damages, the track record of counsel. All necessary — and all incomplete without a parallel read on the defendant. Two structurally similar claims can carry very different risk and duration profiles depending on the counterparty. A defendant with a documented pattern of protracted, scorched-earth defense lengthens the time to resolution and raises the cost of getting there. A financially deteriorating defendant raises questions about collectability on any judgment or settlement. Neither risk is visible in the claim file. Both are properties of the institution being sued.

For a funder deploying capital across a book of matters, those counterparty properties are not side considerations. They drive duration, expected resolution value, and the probability of actually collecting — the variables a portfolio is underwritten on.

What aggregate counterparty intelligence adds

When the defendant is an insurance carrier or a homebuilder — the two institution types DAIS covers — much of what a funder needs to know about its conduct is in the public record, scattered and unassembled. Pulled together at the market level, it becomes a structured input to the underwrite:

• Conduct posture. How the carrier or builder behaves across comparable matters — how contentious, how prone to the disputes that precede litigation, indexed against its peers.
• Resolution benchmarks. The aggregate range of outcomes for comparable matters, by line or defect category and region — a defensible baseline for expected value.
• Financial-health posture. For carrier defendants, a read on financial condition that bears directly on collectability and appetite for prolonged litigation.
• Portfolio scale. For builders, the full enterprise footprint reconnected across subsidiary entities — so a funder is underwriting the developer's true track record, not one project entity's slice of it.

From counterparty read to portfolio discipline

Used case by case, this intelligence sharpens a single underwrite. Used across a portfolio, it does something more valuable: it imposes a consistent counterparty standard. A funder that screens every prospective matter against the same aggregate baseline — defendant conduct posture, resolution benchmarks, financial health — is allocating capital with a discipline that ad hoc, case-by-case diligence cannot match. It is the same portfolio logic that aggregate intelligence brings to a plaintiff firm's case selection, applied to the deployment of investment capital.

It also travels. For funders backing matters across jurisdictions, the same carrier or builder can present a different risk profile from state to state — which is why multi-state comparison matters as much to an underwrite as it does to a litigator.

Delivered responsibly

This intelligence describes institutional conduct — carriers and builders — at the market level, drawn from public records and delivered in aggregate, anonymized form. It is market intelligence to inform a funder's own investment and risk decisions; it is not legal advice, not a recommendation on any particular investment, and it does not surface individual claimants or claims. For more on the approach, see the Methodology page.

The premium layer

The composite a funder needs — conduct posture, resolution benchmarks, financial-health indicators, and reconnected builder portfolios, across multiple jurisdictions — is the intelligence delivered to Founding Members. DAIS's Litigation Intelligence assembles these layers into decision-ready briefs suited to portfolio-level underwriting on the defendant side of the case.