Because legal insurance policies cover the expenses of plaintiffs in bringing legal claims, such policies increase the risk of negligent or careless acts by tortfeasors. For this reason, potential tortfeasors would prefer to avoid injuring holders of legal insurance policies. Since insurance...

Over the last years, third-party financing (TPF) of litigation has received considerable attention from both legal commentators and economists. Legal commentators have mainly examined whether third-party litigation financing agreements violate the common law doctrines of maintenance and...

In this contribution we provide an economic approach to third party funding. We first explain why third party funding emerges. It can be considered as a remedy for the market failure that can occur in cases of so-called dispersed losses where rational apathy may occur, and also when individuals...

The allocation of trial costs and the way a trial progresses are two important issues in civil procedure. The combination of these two elements has received relatively little attention in the law and economics literature. The prior literature has only compared unitary litigation (e.g. liability...

The previous literature on comparative and contributory negligence points out that administrative costs are higher under comparative negligence because the courts must decide on the degree of negligence by both parties and not just whether the parties were negligent. In this article, I show that...

In a dispute involving multifarious points of disagreement, courts have the discretion to adjudicate issues separately in multiple, sequential proceedings or all-at-once in a single unitary proceeding. In this paper, we contrast the effects of sequential and unitary trials on parties' decisions...

This chapter surveys the literature on pure economic loss. It provides a taxonomy of cases that mingle under the label of pure economic loss, discusses the traditional explanations seeking to justify the frequent denial of compensation for pure economic loss and examines the transfer argument of...

This article compares Third Party Financing and Legal Expenses Insurance from an economic perspective. Such a comparison deserves attention for at least two reasons. First, LEI is not particularly widespread in Europe, as is often alleged. In most European countries in which the government does...