Mass tort litigation funding is becoming a data deluge for litigation financiers. Unlike single-case investments, mass torts involve thousands or even tens of thousands of individual claims, often spread across multiple law firms and jurisdictions. Managing the financing for such high-volume, lower-value claims is massively operationally challenging. The sheer volume of claimants and information is overwhelming and each claim progresses on its own timeline, generating data from medical records, court filings, settlements, and payouts. For funders, keeping track of all these moving parts is a monumental task that is exacerbated by increasing pressures on lenders to reduce servicing costs.

Why Mass Torts Are Operationally Complex for Funders

In a typical mass tort, numerous plaintiffs allege similar harm (e.g. a defective drug or toxic exposure) against one or several defendants. From a funder’s perspective, this means financing a portfolio of potentially hundreds or thousands of individual lawsuits.
A high number of low individual value “no win, no fee” claims can prove operationally taxing on asset management firms whose back and middle-office teams often run very lean. Funders often engage with multiple plaintiff law firms to spread the caseload. This diversification, however prudent from a risk perspective, multiplies complexity, as different firms must be kept on the same page and funded according to each claim’s needs.

Moreover, in mass torts not every claim progresses uniformly. At any given time, a funder’s portfolio might include claims at various stages – some awaiting medical records, others in settlement negotiations, others stuck in court proceedings. Case statuses vary widely, and each status impacts funding (e.g. a case nearing settlement might trigger a success fee or repayment, whereas a new filing might require additional rounds of funding). Keeping an eye on each claim’s status is vital but difficult without robust systems. Without proper tools, over-stretch operations teams working with emails and Excel spreadsheets will struggle to manage the deluge of data updates. At best, operational teams will expend all their effort processing data, leaving no time for analysis and meaningful insight that might offer additional “alpha”. At worst, important things will slip through the cracks and critical data issues will be missed. Indeed, in our extensive discussions with lenders we spoke to a number of operational teams who (on condition of anonymity) shared a litany of horror stories covering near misses, hasty corrections, and costly data mistakes.

Data Challenges in Mass Tort Funding

The operational complexity is compounded by data management problems. Litigation funders face a maze of data coming from different law firms and sources, often in incompatible or unstandardised formats. Here are some of the most common data issues that plague mass tort funding arrangements:

• Inconsistent Data Formats: Each law firm may track case data differently – one may use CSV spreadsheets, another plain text over email, others send PDF updates. This patchwork leads to inconsistent data and prevents lenders from gaining deeper portfolio-level insights that might reduce costs or increase returns. Without standardisation, data becomes an operational problem to be managed, rather than a strategic asset to be mined for value.
  
  

• Missing or Late Updates: Funders rely on timely updates (e.g. a new lawsuit filed, a settlement reached, a claimant’s status changed), but in practice updates can be delayed or incomplete. Law firms juggling thousands of clients may not promptly update the funder’s system. Yet data in mass torts is not static – it moves at different speeds for each case and claimant, meaning that continuous updates are needed. When updates arrive late or not at all, funders are essentially flying blind on recent developments.
  
  

• Difficulty Tracking Claim-Level Performance: With so many individual claims, identifying which ones are progressing well and which are stalled is challenging. Important metrics like claim registration rates, dismissals, or settlement amounts may be buried in disparate reports. Funders may find it difficult to drill down to the performance of each claim (e.g. to see how many of a firm’s thousands of cases have settled or been dismissed). Without a consolidated view, teams might resort to manually reviewing case files one by one, often with a large “context-switching” overhead to cross-reference information stored in many different places. Many funders we spoke to produced dashboards or high-level reports on an ad-hoc basis, but most did not have the ability to drill-down to the associated individual case as a single source of the truth – something that we were clear from the outset must be a cornerstone of the Fenaro platform.
  
  

• Slow Reconciliation of Disbursements and Recoveries: Financial tracking is another pain point. Funders typically disburse money (to pay for legal fees, experts, etc.) and later recover their investment plus returns from settlements or judgments. Matching each outgoing disbursement to the corresponding incoming recovery is tricky when dealing with thousands of transactions, even more so when the recovery value needs to be allocated according to a complex waterfall structure. If law firms send periodic accounting in spreadsheets, funders must reconcile those against their own records - a slow and error-prone chore. A lack of transparency means a funder might not realise for weeks or months that, for example, a batch of settlements has come in and needs allocation to investor accounts.

These data issues feed into one another – inconsistent inputs cause delays, delays obscure performance, and poor performance visibility hinders financial reconciliation. The end result is a “garbage in, garbage out” scenario, where messy data undermines decision-making at every level.

Risks of the Data Deluge for Funders

When litigation funders cannot effectively manage the data deluge, significant risks arise for their business:

• Capital Inefficiency: Capital is the lifeblood of litigation funding. If data on case progress is unreliable, funders may deploy capital sub-optimally. For instance, money could remain tied up in claims that have quietly stagnated, when it could be reallocated to more promising cases. Conversely, funders might over-fund certain tranches due to duplicate or inaccurate data. The inability to see the true status of each claim leads to idle or misused capital, dragging down returns. 
  
  

• Reporting Delays and Errors: Litigation funders must report to various stakeholders – internally to management and investment committees, and externally to investors (and sometimes regulators). Poor data management causes delays in reporting portfolio performance or financial results. Monthly or quarterly reports get held up while teams scramble to reconcile numbers from different sources. Even worse, inaccurate or inconsistent data can lead to erroneous reports, undermining credibility. Indeed, we spoke to more than one funder who admitted having to re-issue reports to investors due to simple mistakes only found after publishing. The situation is only becoming more complex with lenders increasingly considering complex investor and SPV relationships to access capital – something that we’ve designed the Fenaro Investor Portal to handle natively.
  
  

• Compliance Blind Spots: Funders operate in a regulated environment, especially in jurisdictions like the UK where many are authorised and must follow rules on client money, conflicts, anti-money laundering, etc. Incomplete data creates compliance blind spots – situations where the funder simply doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. For example, if a law firm fails to update that a certain case was dropped, the funder might continue carrying that case on its books (misstating assets under management) or continue advancing fees that won’t be recoverable. There is also operational compliance to consider: ensuring that drawdowns and repayments happen according to contract terms and often complex interest calculations. Without the right data and tools, a funder might violate covenants or regulations unwittingly, or miss signs of malfeasance. In the worst case, lack of oversight could enable fraud – for instance, an unscrupulous law firm double-dipping on funding or misusing advanced funds – a risk that Fenaro’s case validation and built-in duplicate case checks are designed to mitigate.
  
  

• Portfolio Underperformance: Ultimately, all these issues put the funder’s investment returns at risk. If cases are not tracked well, a funder might miss early warning signs of trouble (e.g. a particular cohort of claims being dismissed for missing paperwork) and fail to intervene. Poor data can also distort risk assessments, leading to funding decisions that don’t reflect reality. This can result in lower recoveries than expected or even losses. One recent lawsuit shows how things can go wrong: a funder invested millions in mass tort cases that a partner law firm promised to file, but the firm delivered only a fraction of them and defaulted on their agreement¹. Such scenarios – effectively data failures and broken promises – highlight the need for rigorous tracking and oversight. While almost every lender we spoke to shared concerns of “cowboy” law firms, with most only cautiously doing significant business with firms they had built up high levels of trust, without backing this up with a rigorous and systematic approach to case analysis and verification is akin to flying blind in a mass tort portfolio. 

Given these risks, it’s no surprise then that a number of lenders we spoke to shared that they were looking to focus more on higher value commercial cases given the bumpy ride they had experienced with mass torts. However, many still believed that there is still a significant amount of value to be extracted from funding mass torts, and were seeking ways to tame the data deluge. The goal is to turn masses of messy information into a strategic asset rather than a liability. This is where Fenaro enters the picture.

How Technology Platforms Can Help

Modern problems require modern solutions. To manage complex financing arrangements for mass torts, litigation funders require technology platforms purpose-built for mass claims. Unlike generic spreadsheets or patchwork databases, these platforms must be designed to handle high-volume, multi-claim datasets and provide real-time insights. Here are key ways technology can transform the funder’s operational workflow:

• Automated Data Ingestion from Law Firms: A mass tort platform can integrate directly with law firm case management systems or intake portals to automatically pull case data on a regular basis. Instead of waiting for a quarterly Excel report, the funder gets continuous data feeds. The Fenaro Borrower Portal allows both direct and indirect uploads of case data from law firms, reducing manual data entry effort and minimising the risk of human error. We’re extending this to allow API connectivity to key legal case management platforms, to ensure that new claims, status changes, and information from each funded firm flow into one central repository in near real-time. The result is a living, breathing portfolio dashboard rather than static snapshots, providing much greater control and oversight for lenders, but also for law firms who are able to keep much better track of their borrowing burn-down against case progress.
  
  

• Consolidated Multi-Claimant Tracking: Technology can provide a single source of truth for all claims across all firms. With a centralised platform, funders gain full drill-down visibility from portfolio-level, right down to claim-level, with full traceability throughout. Each claimant’s status, expenses, and outcomes are tracked in the system, and these roll up into aggregate metrics. Visual dashboards help make sense of the data deluge – for instance, showing how many total claims are active, how many have settled, average settlement value per claimant, and so on. We’ve built Fenaro from the ground up to put all the critical information at lenders’ fingertips, enabling true performance monitoring of multi-claimant investments.
  
  

• Real-Time Metrics and Data-Driven Capital Drawdowns: When data is updated continuously, funders can make funding decisions based on current, not historical, information. Real-time metrics (such as claim registration rates, filings, or settlements this month) allow for more dynamic capital management. Funders can schedule drawdowns of capital or releases of funds to law firms in tranches tied to actual progress. For example, a funding agreement might allow a law firm to draw additional funds once 1000 claims are filed or when 500 claims have medical reports uploaded. With automated tracking, the platform can notify the funder as soon as those conditions are met – and even facilitate the drawdown process. This ensures capital is deployed exactly when and where needed, based on data triggers rather than fixed dates. In addition, platforms help enforce discipline: built-in safeguards can prevent double-funding of the same case or unauthorised draws. Overall, Fenaro enables a data-driven funding approach where every pound, dollar, or euro is traceable to a claimant milestone, vastly improving capital efficiency.
  
  

• Standardised Operational Reporting: A dedicated mass tort platform can also streamline reporting and compliance. Because all data resides in one system (and is updated automatically), generating reports for different stakeholders becomes much easier. Funders can configure templates for operational reporting – from high-level summaries for executives, to detailed breakdowns for investment partners, to required reports for courts or regulators. With a few clicks, the latest figures on disbursements, recoveries, claim statuses, and returns can be compiled and exported. Likewise, for investors, the Fenaro Investor Portal is designed to instil confidence by ensuring everyone sees the same consistent numbers, reducing discrepancies. By contrast, in traditional setups, such visibility was hard to achieve – reports were ad-hoc and often out-of-sync. Fenaro ensures that everyone has the same up-to-date information, closing the loop on communication and improving relationships with investors.

In summary, the right technology platform acts as a central nervous system for mass tort funding operations: ingesting data from the environment, processing it into usable intelligence, and sending signals (notifications, reports, triggers) to guide actions. It turns the chaos of thousands of claims into a rich and trusted dataset that can be mined for value. 

A Growing Need as Mass Claims Rise Globally

These data and operational challenges are becoming even more critical because mass claims are on the rise – not just in the United States, but in the UK, Europe, and around the world. In the UK and EU, recent years have seen an “exponential” growth of group litigation, fueled by more permissive legal frameworks and the booming litigation funding market. As a result, mass claims now touch almost every industry sector, from product liability and pharmaceuticals to financial services and environmental disasters². For example, Europe has faced large-scale claims for defective medical devices and toxic exposures, and new EU directives (such as the revised Product Liability Directive in 2024) are expected to spur even more collective actions. Climate and environmental claims are also emerging, holding companies accountable for pollution or climate impacts, often involving entire communities of claimants. In the UK, group actions (from data breaches to consumer product claims) have quickly become a major facet of the legal landscape. This broad trend means that litigation funders will increasingly find themselves managing high-volume claims globally, not just occasional big-ticket cases.

The rising tide of mass torts and group actions makes dealing with the data deluge all the more urgent. Funders who can master data management will be well-positioned to capitalise on these opportunities safely. Those who stick to ad hoc, manual methods risk being swamped by a growing wave of claims. As one white paper observed, funders and law firms are now pursuing novel claims that previously would not have been feasible, thanks in part to available funding – but this also means a greater burden of managing large claimant groups and the attendant data². In this evolving landscape, purpose-built tools for mass tort management are not just a convenience, but a competitive necessity. They offer the chance to turn what could be an operational nightmare into a scalable, repeatable process.

Conclusion

As mass tort and group litigation continues to expand in the UK, Europe and beyond, funders have a timely opportunity to upgrade their operations. Those who do so will be able to support justice for thousands of claimants — not with confusion and backlog, but with efficient, well-informed financing that keeps all stakeholders in the loop. Dealing with the mass torts data deluge is no small task, but with the right platform and processes, it’s an attainable goal. In the end, transforming how data is handled will position litigation funders to thrive in this growing segment of the legal market, turning a torrent of data into a strategic advantage.

About Fenaro

Fenaro is the platform for managing operationally complex assets - built from the ground-up to meet the complex needs of litigation funders. Find out more at Fenaro.com.

Fenaro is onboarding now, book a demo today and see how we can help your fund deal with the unique data challenges posed by funding high volumes of mass torts cases.

Sources

1.   3M, J&J Mass Tort Funder Sues NY Law Firm for Investment Debacle
   https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/3m-j-j-mass-tort-funder-sues-ny-law-firm-for-investment-debacle

2.  The Rise of US-Style Class Actions in the UK and Europe | Insights | Jones Day
   https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2023/10/the-rise-of-usstyle-class-actions-in-the-uk-and-europe