A battle over litigation finance will be addressed by the House Judiciary Committee this week in a markup that has flown under the radar, multiple corporations involved in the fight told the Washington Reporter.
One bill, the Protecting Third Party Litigation Funding From Abuse Act, has a scheduled markup following the rollout of a previous bill, the Litigation Transparency Act of 2025. The legislation’s proponents and opponents don’t fall along neat ideological lines. Its proponents argue that addressing risks from foreign and domestic third-party litigation funding (TPLF), the bill can protect Americans’ privacy and free speech rights while ending abusive lawsuits that drive up costs for consumers, a source familiar with the matter told the Reporter.
The bill has a provision that would require litigants in civil actions to disclose entities that are not a named party to the litigation, but which have a right to receive payment contingent on the the litigation.
The bill includes privacy protections d and forbids donor disclosure; it also requires in camera review prior to the production of any litigation funding documents, while requiring courts to allow for redactions that protect individual privacy, a source familiar with the bill said.
This markup comes as some conservative groups like Consumers’ Research (CR) took their opposition to similar bills directly to Capitol Hill. In an advocacy campaign first reported by the Reporter, CR plastered the Capitol with a mock newspaper called The Daily Chubb and had a mobile billboard warn viewers about what it labeled the “woke” insurance giant.
Among the bill’s advocates in 2025 were Sen. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) and Rep. Kevin Hern (R., Okla.). The latter legislator said at the time that “frivolous lawsuits have gotten out of control in recent years, largely because of these third-party funders fueling a market that is ballooning. Taxing these third-party entities will limit unmeritorious lawsuits and provide economic relief to the middle class.” Among the groups most supportive of legislation that reforms litigation finance are the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies (NAMIC), Uber, and other tech giants.
But, CR and its executive director, Will Hild, are not the only ones on the right who have concerns about the disclosure requirements that both versions of the legislation would require. In one instance, the founding president and former CEO of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) warned in a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) that bills like the new legislation could “prompt[] serious concerns relative to the privacy of Americans and the ability for conservative legal organizations and our allies to litigate cases critical to defending the rights of Americans.”
“Mandated disclosure, no matter its form, is facially unconstitutional and will bring to a halt much funding for conservative advocacy,” ADF founder Alan Sears wrote in a letter provided exclusively to the Reporter. “This remains true both in cases where such mandates target the financial contributions received by non-profit and religious organizations, or litigants supported by commercial litigation financing. As I previously warned, such disclosure mechanisms can and will be weaponized. This bill threatens to hand a cudgel to the left and those who seek to undermine important legal battles over vital issues like the sanctity of life, parental rights, transgender identity, and religious liberty.”
To Sears, concerns are far from hypothetical. His organization, where Johnson used to work, “is actively fighting against similar abuses before the U.S. Supreme Court. In First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Platkin, the petitioners, a faith-based organization that provides pregnant women with information to make life-affirming decisions, are victims of such unlawful, politically targeted disclosure tactics. In 2023, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin issued a subpoena to First Choice demanding it hand over more than a decade of documents, including the identity of clients, donors, and personnel.”
“First Choice was targeted because of its pro-life and religious views,” Sears wrote. “Attorney General Platkin’s subpoena not only violates First Choice’s First Amendment rights, it threatens the safety and privacy of the women the organization helped.”
