BREAKING NEWS The US Chamber seems to suggest that consumer legal funding poses national security threats

An Institute for Legal Reform report suggests that third-party litigation funding could pose national security risks. The US Chamber is pushing the issue but it is getting mixed up with Consumer Legal Funding. These are two very different types of funding. Law professor Jeremy Kidd says this is irrelevant to consumer legal funding, which generally involves lending a few thousand dollars to support litigants awaiting accident settlements.

According to Kidd “The relatively mundane function of consumer legal funding is hardly the stuff of international intrigue and spy craft, and yet that is exactly what the US Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform is telling legislators across the country in its most recent legal research brief, warning that third-party litigation funding could pose national security risks.”

Furthermore, Kidd writes “The Chamber of Commerce is engaged in a textbook case of the fallacy of composition—assuming that what may be true of one part must be true of the whole. Because the introduction of outside funding into commercial litigation might pose a threat to our national security, any outside funding will do the same.”

Read more about the potentially purposeful confusion the US Chamber is sowing on Bloomberg Law.