There are numerous companies that claim they will give month to a claimant to buy a right to the future settlement. They say its not a loan, but rather a purchase of a suit. In order for them to buy into a claim, they get permission from the plaintiff to review the file, discuss the case with the attorney, in order to make an assessment as to whether there is a more likely than not potential that the plaintiff will win. If the plaintiff does win the case, in the future, then the plaintiff must share proceeds of the case with the plaintiff's new partner.

My question is why would any attorney want a company looking over his shoulder every time he acts on the case? The attorney now opens himself up to additional malpractice claims and because there is not the injuryed plaintiff and his business partner in the case?

There must be some sort of violation of lending laws or legal ethical rules. Anyone else experienced this before?

Henkel has the same problem and/or queries to which Sumo replied exactly like the following:

This is a little derivation of the old selling your judgment business. For years companies have been buying potential judgments. These companies find plainitffs going through cases, evalute the case. If for example the company evaluates the case is worth $100,000.00, the company will offer the plaintiff 10-20K right now to assign his/her rights to a future judgment. Then for this fee, the company takes the risk of potentially getting ajudgment or not. If a judgment is obtained, they make money, if not they lose. These companies also offer to buy structured judgments. Plaintiff has a million dollar judgment paid over the course of ten years with interest, they offer the plaintiff a lump sum buy out of about 15-40% depending on the case flow, and the Plaintiff for a pay out today, assings his/her rights to this stream of payments. Has been happening for years. A lot of people have a lot of ethical questions about it, but its legal.

Personally, i don't think it's ethical. But as they say, not everything that is legal is ethical, more so moral. In my reply, i hoped there would be some legislation to address this supposed business practice. To begin with, it encourage others to speculate on the outcome of cases in our judicial system. This practice must be curtailed.

There is little that I know about regarding the ethics of this. Most attorneys I know hate it when clients sell there case, but its not up to the lawyre, its the clients case to sell. I don't think there has been much debate over this yet because we probably have not had one go horribly wrong. Its usally when something turns out really bad when the ethics police start chiming in with the two cents worth of advise. But we will see....

Its amazing the way people figure out to make a dollar. I never knew these types of companies existed until I started reading these posts.

The attorneys that I know that have been involved in this don't like it much either and feel there should some regulation with these companies. I mean, they pay pennies on teh dollar and a lot of clients accept it because they just want some money now, and its generally spend very quickly, not helping them a bit.