Litigation Funding Overview

Introduction

While litigation funding services have been around in Germany for more than 20 years, the market has only recently seen strong growth in terms of funded cases and funding budgets.

Today, the market for litigation funding in Germany is rapidly expanding, and funders are competing over attractive cases and market segments.

More and more companies in Germany are discovering the advantages of litigation funding and making use of the service in the commercial litigation and arbitration space.

Private Enforcement

One area with strong growth in Germany is private enforcement of follow-on antitrust claims, in which companies claim for damage that they incurred as victims of a cartel after the cartelists have been fined by either the German Federal Cartel Office or the European Commission.

Not only consumers but also corporations have used litigation funding to claim damages relating to the diesel emission scandal of large carmakers, notably Volkswagen and other German original equipment manufacturers.

Growth of Legal Technology

Furthermore, part of the recent success story of litigation funding are the several legal tech companies operating in Germany that offer consumers no-win no-fee arrangements for enforcing certain (more or less identical) rights and claims using highly automated systems, such as:

claiming compensation for violation of air passenger rights.
repayment of illegal above-market rental fees.
recovery of losses from illegal online gambling activities.

In addition, private and institutional investors are seeking third party funding to recover their losses in the aftermath of corporate scandals that have lately emerged in Germany and harmed investors (e.g., Wirecard, Volkswagen, Bayer and Daimler).

Evolution of Funding Providers

There have been many changes in the roster of litigation funding providers in recent years. Numerous litigation financiers have exited the market, but new ones have also entered.

While some years ago, it was predominantly subsidiaries of large insurance groups that offered funding services in Germany, presenting the service a bit as an ex post alternative to a legal protection insurance, over the years, more companies with different backgrounds and global reach have entered the market. With that also came a diversification of offers, conditions and target markets.

Overall, the strategic orientation and fields of the law of the funders operating in Germany differ significantly. Some of the litigation funders are very targeted on certain types of disputes or areas of the law, while others fund all types of cases.

Most have minimum (and maximum) thresholds as to the claim values or funding budgets they are comfortable funding. The minimum amount in dispute is often over €100,000, but even smaller claims are partly eligible for funding, especially now with several legal tech companies operating in Germany. Importantly, the specific appetite for risk and for complexity can also differ significantly across providers.

Litigation Funding Trends

A noteworthy trend we observe on the demand side of the market is that more and more companies are seeking funding not primarily because they lack the necessary funds to pursue their claim, but rather for strategic reasons.

Key advantage

A key advantage to using litigation funding for companies is that pursuing a fully funded dispute is balance-sheet neutral, so no accruals need to be made for the expected costs of enforcing a claim.

Often, disclosing the involvement of a litigation funder can also bring momentum into the development of a dispute and help nudge defendants to move towards negotiations for a potential settlement. With growing education and maturity of the market also comes increased competition for cases, as more and more companies seeking funding for their disputes will pitch their case to several litigation funders.

Litigation Funding in Germany - Significant Changes

The year 2023 brought some significant changes to the legal landscape and a number of critical questions for the future of litigation funding in Germany to the German and European courts.

Collective Action for Redress

For the first time in German history, consumers will have access to collective action for redress. The Consumer Rights Enforcement Act passed the federal parliament and the federal council and entered into force in October 2023. Before that, German law had not provided for class action systems.

Financial Investor Model

The only relevant exceptions are the financial investor model proceedings for violations of securities law and the model declaratory action for certain wrongdoings affecting large groups of consumers, but both types of actions have a limited scope and are limited to declaratory judgments.

Notably, the new law will also include an amendment of Section 10 of the Act against Unfair Competition on the confiscation of profits from illegal commercial practices in such a way that the financing of lawsuits for the surrender of these profits are to be facilitated.

The new provision in Section 10 (6) Act against Unfair Competition expressly permits the use of litigation funders who, in the event of a successful outcome, can agree to be entitled to a portion of the proceeds. With this, the legislator reacts to a decision of the Federal Court of Justice (BGH),[2] which had ruled that the involvement of litigation funding is inadmissible and made the already low number of confiscation proceedings come to a standstill.

However, the new law requires that, in each case, the Federal Office of Justice must approve the involvement and financing conditions of the litigation funder as reasonable and customary.

Without a regime for collective redress actions, lawyers still widely used the assignment of claims model to bundle and collectively enforce claims.

The Assignment Model

In this model, claimants assign their claim to a special purpose vehicle (SPV), which then serves as the plaintiff in litigation. It can be used to bundle the claims of hundreds or even thousands of victims in one action with only one plaintiff. The particular advantage of an assignment of claims is that the respective legal proceedings can be managed more efficiently. Instead of thousands of individual plaintiffs, there is just one. The assignment of claims model is especially used in the context of the private enforcement of antitrust claims and mass consumer litigation.

In a number of cases, especially its Lexfox,[3] Wenigermiete[4] and Air Berlin Inkasso[5] decisions, the highest German civil court, BGH, ruled that the assignment of claims model was valid. In the latter case, several consumers had purchased flight tickets from an airline company shortly before it became insolvent and ceased operations.

To reclaim their flight fees, the claimants assigned their claims to a claim vehicle for enforcement in court.

The legal tech company that collected and bundled the individual claimholder's claims offered to fully fund the collections.

It agreed to assume all costs and financial risks in connection with the enforcement in return for a 35 per cent share in the net proceeds. The BGH found that the assignment model was in line with the Legal Services Act, even if the purpose of the assignment was to claim damages in court from the very start.

It argued that in court, the claim vehicle is represented by a lawyer who ensures the necessary qualified legal advice. The BGH further held that the debt collection service provider's fundamental right of professional freedom must be taken into account and cannot be restricted without sufficient justification. The court found that any potential conflict of interest that may arise between the damaged parties and the claim vehicle or conflict of interest between holders of stronger and weaker claims are offset by other advantages of the assignment model, such as efficiency gains.

However, some lower courts in Germany still argue that the principles set by the BGH should not apply to antitrust damages actions because of the complexity of the underlying claims.

In the Round Timber case, the District Court of Dortmund found that this interpretation of the law does not comply with the principles of effective legal protection and effectiveness under EU law (Directive 2014/104) and, therefore, referred this question to the European Court of Justice (ECJ).[6]

The cartel victims of the Round Timber cartel are sawmills that assigned their damages claims to a claim vehicle which bundled these claims for enforcement purposes. Different from most antitrust damages actions, the plaintiff in this case cannot base its claim on a formally binding decision by the Federal Cartel Office (FCO), a follow-on action, but must rely on facts from a commitment decision of the FCO in a stand-alone action regarding the infringement of antitrust law by the defendant.

Therefore, the District Court of Dortmund submitted its questions to the ECJ distinguishing between the two different types of antitrust damages claims. It assumes that, in both cases, the assignment of antitrust damages claims to a claim vehicle must be valid under EU law for cartel victims being able to effectively enforce their claims.

In antitrust damages actions, Section 33g of the Act against Restraints of Competition could become more relevant for plaintiffs seeking information and evidence from the other side. While the provision did not attract much attention or even practical relevance in the past, the BGH now clarified on the requirements for these claims in favour of potential plaintiffs.[7]

The BGH ruled that it is sufficient to establish a prima facie case that a claim for cartel damages may exist if there is a certain probability of this on the basis of concrete indications. It found that Section 33g of the Act against Restraints of Competition must be interpreted autonomously in conformity with EU law and, therefore, the claim does not require the higher degree of probability laid down in Section 294 Code of Civil Procedure.

A fundamental question regarding the litigation funding landscape in Germany lies with the ECJ.

In Germany, law firms are prohibited from third party ownership. Although, in the course of the reform of Federal Lawyers' Act (BRAO) in August 2022, the circle of professions that may become partners in a law firm was expanded to liberal professions, capital owners with purely financial interests (i.e., without their own active involvement, and those who are simply capital providers without belonging to a liberal profession, continue to be excluded).

In April 2023, the Bavarian Bar Court (AGH) referred the question to the ECJ of whether the prohibition of third party ownership in Germany violates the European freedoms of capital movement and services. In the underlying case, the German bar association revoked the admission of a Rechtsanwalts-UG based on the regulations of the BRAO[8] after an Austrian GmbH, which was not itself admitted to the bar, had taken over 51 per cent of the shares in the UG. The UG filed an action against the revocation of the admission with the competent court.

Legal and regulatory framework

i No regulatory framework

To date, third party litigation funding is not a regulated business in Germany, and hence there is no particular designated set of rules or a competent body for government supervision regarding litigation funding.

Administrative authorities and courts have confirmed in several decisions that litigation financing is permissible and cannot be viewed as either an insurance or banking product, which would entail the application of certain bodies of regulation. However, there are currently aspirations by European lawmakers to regulate the European market for litigation funding,[9] which would also impact the German market.

At this point, it is too early to tell whether and what kind of regulation will come out of this proposal eventually. It appears that the European Commission wants to sufficiently explore and understand the market for third party litigation funding and consult with the relevant interested parties first before moving towards legislative action.

In 2021, the renewed Legal Services Act,[10] for the first time in German statutory law, acknowledged the existence and business of litigation funders.

The law states, regarding the relevant area of consumers' collective redress against corporations by means of a third party, as debt collection service providers are referred to, that the involvement of a litigation funder in a case does not per se imply a conflict of interest that would taint the claim vehicle's standing to sue. The lawmaker thereby invalidated a key defence argument that defendants in collective actions had often pleaded.

ii Lawyers' ethical rules

In contrast to other jurisdictions, attorneys in Germany are rather strictly prohibited from offering litigation funding services to their clients outside of very narrow exceptions.

They must not work for contingency fees and are under no circumstances allowed to offer to clients to advance court fees or pay the adverse party costs if a dispute is lost. The traditional line of argument for this prohibition has been the desire to protect the market for legal advice from excessive commercialisation, which could negatively affect the attorneys' independent role in the legal system – which, looking at today's law firm market, seems somewhat outdated.

As of 2008, following a decision by Germany's Constitutional Court,[11] lawyer and client can agree on a contingency fee for an individual case if the client would otherwise be deterred from pursuing legal action on the basis of his or her individual circumstances, particularly his or her financial situation.[12] With the recent implementation of the renewed Legal Services Act, the broad ban was carefully lifted further, and lawyers were permitted, under certain conditions, to agree to success-based remuneration.

Primarily, lawyers are now permitted to work for a contingency fee (no-win-no-fee) for (undisputed) monetary claims up to €2,000. Here, however, the no-win-no-fee only applies if an appropriate surcharge on the statutory fee is agreed in the case of a successful outcome.

Additionally, lawyers are now allowed to offer out-of-court debt collection services.

In principle, lawyers in Germany are obliged to inform their clients about the possibility of seeking litigation funding when discussing the strategic options available in advance of a dispute. However, this obligation does not go as far as checking and informing the client as to which specific litigation financier is particularly favourable for the client and the specific case.

Without an explicit mandate, the lawyer cannot be expected to conduct extensive market research and contact several litigation financiers.[13] It is advisable for attorneys, however, to at least mention the possibility of trying to get funding to clients when discussing the potential cost of litigating a dispute.

iii Collective Redress Regime

Based on the European collective redress directive, Germany's new law on the collective action for redress with a new collective claim type will enter into force in 2023.

This is the next step for collective actions after, in 2018, Germany already introduced a model declaratory action that provided a mechanism for collective suits for declaratory relief.

Now, the new regime will allow for collective redress claims that can lead to a final court decision ordering the defendant to pay monetary compensation to a group of individuals – either consumers or SMEs with a staff of up to 10 and an annual turnover of up to €2 million – whose claims are defined by mutual criteria, and who have registered to participate in the action of a consumer protection agency (an opt-in mechanism).

Formally, litigation funders are permitted to provide the necessary funds for these actions in return for a limited compensation. However, important provisions of the law were changed last minute in the legislative process to the effect that it is de facto impossible to fund collective actions for redress as a commercial third party funder.

This is especially due to the fact that the law strictly limits the share from the proceeds of the successful claim a litigation funder may agree to receive to 10 per cent,[14] potential members of the class actions are always able to free-ride a collective action by registering to the class without entering into a financing agreement with a funder and the distribution mechanism does not allow for the funder to receive his or her share of the proceeds. Additionally, it is required that the funding agreement must be fully disclosed to the court.[15]

iv Assignment model

As the conception of the collective redress regime will, if at all, not attract many actions funded by third parties in Germany, the assignment model will most likely stay an often-used construction for the purpose of collective redress actions.

In this model, all claim holders who wish to participate in an action assign their individual claims to one entity, often an SPV exclusively used for this purpose, which will serve as a claimant.

Many of those claims are funded by a third party litigation funder. Sometimes, the funder requires a small administrative fee for entering a party's claims into the group action. In the event of success, a fee becomes due, which usually is calculated as a certain percentage of the amount successfully recovered. In the event of a defeat, no success fee is due.

This construction has been the subject of numerous court decisions, in consumer cases, antitrust cases and more, and its admissibility has been questioned across cases. In recent decisions (in 2019 Lexfox,[16] in 2021 Airdeal[17] and in 2022 Diesel),[18] Germany's highest civil court, the BGH, has unequivocally made clear that such funding models are generally lawful in Germany.

For the special case of antitrust damages actions, the issue of legality of the assignment model is currently pending before the ECJ (see details in Section II).

Structuring the agreement

Unlike lawyers, third party litigation funders are not fundamentally subject to a professional duty of confidentiality. Therefore, an interested party should enter into a non-disclosure agreement with the funder before exchanging sensitive information on the respective case.

In practice, this is often done as one of the first steps, after the funder has signalled a general interest in the case based on a high-level description of the nature of the dispute.

Once the case review on the side of the funder has led to a positive indication, the parties usually negotiate a non-binding term sheet to agree on the relevant commercial parameters of the funding.

Most funders will, in the term sheet, require the client to agree to an exclusivity period of one to two months, during which the client is prohibited from entering into a funding agreement with a different litigation financier. During this exclusivity period, the funder usually conducts an in-depth due diligence of the claim, often supported by third party experts, such as attorneys and economic experts, to identify the relevant risks and chances of pursuing the claim.

When the parties have found an agreement in principle, they start negotiating the litigation funding agreement (LFA). German law does not contain any specifics as to LFAs, so the parties are free to structure their agreement as they wish and to include any topics they want to cover.

The LFA is viewed as a mixed-type contract similar to that for the formation of a civil law partnership under German law in the form of an internal company[19] without any joint and several assets or liability.

Once the litigation funder has decided to fund the case, the essentials an LFA usually covers are, among others, the following elements:

the total budget and its allocation (e.g., court fees, lawyer fees, expert fees, adverse party costs) for each court instance;
the funder's return, which often depends on the duration of the proceeding or at what instance the legal dispute is resolved;
a security for the funder's return in the case of success. Usually, the funded claim is silently assigned to the litigation funder but the client stays the plaintiff and claimholder in the litigation;
the client usually agrees not to initiate cost-triggering measures in the litigation without first obtaining the financier's consent;
under German law, it is important that the claimant and not the litigation funder retains the lawyer to litigate the claim. At the same time, the client usually agrees to relieve the attorney from any confidentiality duties in relation to the funder;
the grounds based on which each party shall be entitled to terminate the agreement;
provisions on coordination and consent requirements (e.g., acceptance of a settlement offer, appeal after an unsuccessful first instance or a withdrawal of the claim). Here, it is important to find the right balance between the funder's security interest and the claimant's sovereignty. The claimant's general freedom to make its own decisions as to the claim must remain untouched. This last point is highly sensitive in the assignment of claims model, and German courts and lawmakers have not yet developed clear guidelines as to what level of influence a funder may be granted under German law; and
furthermore, litigation funding agreements generally contain certain disclosure and confidentiality duties, as well as warranties and guarantees.

Remuneration mechanisms

With regard to the funder's fee, a number of remuneration mechanisms have become market standards. Parties usually either agree that the funder will (usually after the return of all expenses paid) receive a certain percentage of the proceeds of the dispute, a multiple on the capital deployed or the capital committed, or a combination of both.

This can be staggered and modified based on, for example, time passed or expenses paid. While there is no fixed standard for remuneration in case law or statutory law, it is advisable to have a transparent and clear remuneration clause. One key element of funding, and of the remuneration clause, is that any amounts owed by the plaintiff to the funder will only come from the proceeds of the case and under no circumstance exceed this amount.

When a consumer wishes to sign up for a collective action organised by a registered debt collection service provider and funded by a third party financier, a couple of newly introduced transparency obligations apply: among others, the claimholder must be informed about other potential options he or she can utilise to enforce his or her claim, especially any that would allow the consumer to receive the full claim amount without paying a funder's fee; the consumer is entitled to full information on the funding agreement, including the funder's fee; and if the debt collection service provider will be entitled to accept settlements on behalf of the individual claimholders, further information requirements as to the potential financial consequences of such a settlement for the claimholder and on the revocability of any settlements apply.[20]

Disclosure

i Disclosure of funding – judiciary proceedings

There are no statutory requirements in German law to disclose the existence, let alone the specific terms, of a litigation funding agreement to either the court or the defendant in a litigation.

In group proceedings working with an SPV serving as plaintiff after the claimholders have assigned their claims to it, disclosure of funding has become a relevant issue. Courts have requested funded plaintiffs to disclose the identity of the funder and the respective funding terms.

The background is that German law considers it as a breach of bones mores to assign claims to an underfunded entity to appear as plaintiff, because this could potentially deprive the defendant of its cost reimbursement claim if the case is lost.[21] The practical implication of this jurisprudence is enormous.

If the plaintiff vehicle was, at any point in time during the assignment process, not sufficiently funded to satisfy the respective adverse party reimbursement claim, a court can declare the assignment itself invalid and dismiss the claim as unfounded because the plaintiff never held the claim.

This also means that the initiated litigation did not suspend the limitation periods for the claims in question, because the rights to the individual claim were still with the original claim holders. In a number of cases, this has resulted in the full loss of the claims without a possibility to re-initiate a new action.

ii No discovery

Germany is a civil law jurisdiction. There is no general concept of discovery or production of documents that parties to a dispute can rely upon to receive information from the other side.

Courts may, upon request of one party, order the other party to produce specific documents that are relevant to the case (Section 142 of the Code of Civil Procedure, Section 33g of the Act against Restraints of Competition), but so far these provision are only applied by the courts in rare instances.

iii Disclosure of funding – arbitration

The German civil procedure rules on Arbitration (Sections 1025–1066 of the Code of Civil Procedure) do not require the claimant to disclose the existence or identity of a litigation funder to the arbitral tribunal or the respondent in the proceedings.

Arbitral institutions may, in their rules, order that the involvement of a funder be made transparent. The rules of DIS, the leading German arbitration centre, do not provide for any such duty, in line with most institutional arbitration rules. However, should the parties have agreed to implement the 2014 IBA guidelines on conflicts of interest in international arbitration[22] into their agreement, they should observe Guideline 7a of the rules, which will, under certain circumstances, provide a duty to disclose any third party that has a financial interest in the outcome of the arbitration.

In most cases, however, arbitration panels and parties will only refer to those (and comparable) rules as soft guidelines, without firm obligations arising from them.

Costs

i Judiciary proceedings

Litigation in Germany is significantly cheaper than in some common law jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom or the United States, but costs are at the upper end of the spectrum among civil law countries.

A benefit in Germany is that costs and adverse party risks for litigation are highly foreseeable and static, with only minor exceptions, such as fees for court-ordered expert opinions.

Of course, as far as attorneys are paid by the hour instead of the statutory remuneration, parties' own attorneys' fees are also only foreseeable to a certain extent.

Time-based billing is the market standard in complex disputes, especially in certain areas of law, for example, competition law, intellectual property law and commercial arbitration, but also in other fields. In addition, the plaintiff is obliged to advance court fees,[23] which, for some claimants, can make it difficult in certain cases to pursue a claim from the very start.

As a rule, the bearing of costs follows the parties' success in the case (loser pays). This applies to attorneys' fees, court fees and potential further expenses, and the court will usually allocate the costs proportionally to the specific monetary outcome on the merits. Attorneys' fees are reimbursable up to the statutory fees only, which are calculated based on a claim's value. Note that each party will bear its own attorneys' costs beyond the statutory fees, regardless of the outcome of the litigation.

It is common in LFAs to also include any adverse party risk, that is, the cost reimbursement claims of the defendant, primarily for his or her own attorneys, but potentially also for court fees, as far as the defendant had to pay them. Funders often seek insurance (after the event insurance) for this cost risk to limit their total exposure.

If requested by the other party, the funder will often also provide security for adverse costs, which the defendant can ask for in certain situations (e.g., if the seat of the plaintiff is located outside of the European Union).

Under German law, the funder cannot be held liable directly for any cost claims from the court or the adverse party, so the LFA between funder and client should fully address those issues.

When working with a funder, the contingency fee is often between 20 and 35 per cent of the case's proceeds, but it can increase to as much as 50 per cent, especially when smaller amounts are in dispute or where the prospects of a dispute are very insecure due to unforeseeable legal or factual issues.

When the claim amount reaches a certain level, individual solutions are negotiated between funder and its client and depend on, among other things, the risk profile, the potential upside and the expected duration of a case.

ii Arbitration

The cost of arbitration in Germany depends heavily on the arbitral institution chosen by the parties. The best-known institution in Germany, the DIS, provides rules for the allocation and repayment of costs in Articles 32 to 36 of the Arbitration Rules and gives the tribunal very broad discretion as to what costs in relation to the arbitration shall be deemed recoverable, and which party bears what part of the costs. The tribunal shall, to this end, take into consideration all relevant circumstances of the case, including but not limited to the outcome of the case and the efficiency of the conduct of proceedings.

If the parties conduct non-institutional ad hoc arbitration, the tribunal decides on the allocation of costs among the parties in its free discretion. Unless otherwise agreed upon by the parties, a main factor in this decision shall be the outcome on the merits.

In contrast to state court litigation, the sum of recoverable fees is not capped at a certain (statutory) level. As part of its decision on costs, the arbitral tribunal also decides what expenses of a party were useful and reasonable, and can, therefore, be recovered (in full or in part) from the other side.

There is a growing trend that arbitral tribunals also award (parts of) the cost for procuring third party funding to the prevailing party, provided its decision to seek funding was reasonable and the terms were adequate. A prevailing party in an arbitration dispute should, therefore, consider adding the funder's fee to its request for cost compensation.

Litigation Funding in Germany: Conclusions and outlook

The modernisation and competitiveness of Germany as a legal forum is at a crossroads. The German implementation of the EU Directive on representative actions for the protection of consumers[24] did not fully live up to the high expectations and, for collective consumer actions, it must be feared that the general potential of the new collective redress regime will not materialise because, in practice, consumer will not be able to bring claims with the necessary financial support of litigation funders.

Therefore, it can be expected that parties will continue to battle over the validity of different assignment models. With regard to antitrust damages cases, in which this issue is often critical for the restitution of the victims of antitrust infringements, the ECJ will hopefully provide clarity on this issue soon.

In the same way, the ECJ will likely lead the way on the question of third party ownership in German law firms. However, an answer from the ECJ is not expected until 2024 at the earliest. It remains to be seen whether the Federal Ministry of Justice will use the time to take the matter into its own hands and review the limitations of third party ownership in Germany.

Footnotes

1 Malte Stübinger is general counsel and Tim Willing is senior legal counsel at Deminor.

2 Federal Court of Justice (BGH), decision from 13 September 2018 – I ZR 26/17.

3 BGH, decision from 27 November 2019 – VIII ZR 285/18.

4 BGH, decision from 8 April 2020 – VIII ZR 130/19.

5 BGH, decision of 13 July 2021 – II ZR 84/20.

6 District Court of Dortmund, decision of 13 March 2023 – 8 O 7/20 (Kart).

7 BGH, decision of 4 April 2023 – KZR 20/21.

8 Section 59e BRAO (old version in force until 31 July 2022).

9 See Initiative 2020/2130(INL), Responsible private funding of litigation, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2022-0308_EN.html#title1.

10 BGBl. I 2021, p. 3415.

11 Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfG) decision of 12 December 2006 – 1 BvR 2576/04: the Constitutional Court saw a violation of Article 12 of the Constitution (freedom of work and profession) in the strict prohibition without any exceptions, especially where a client would otherwise not be able to pursue the intended litigation.

12 See § 4aRVG, 49b BRAO; importantly, if the client is eligible for statutory legal aid due to his or her financial standing, this is considered as the predominant way to receive access to justice, and the contingency or success fee path is barred.

13 Higher Regional Court of Cologne, decision of 5 November 2018 (5 U 33/18).

14 § 4 Sec. 2 No. 3 VRDuG.

15 § 4 Sec. 3 VRDuG.

16 BGH, decision of 27 November 2019 – VIII ZR 285.

17 BGH, decision of 13 July 2021 – II ZR 84/20.

18 BGH, decision of 13 June 2022 – VIa ZR 418/21; BGH, decision of 10 October 2022 – VIa ZR 184/22.

19 See, among others, District Court Hamburg, decision of 17 July 2018 – 411 HKO 9/17.

20 See Section 13b Legal Services Act (RDG).

21 Düsseldorf Court of Appeals, decision of 18 February 2015 – VI U 3/15, in a funded case.

22 https://www.ibanet.org/MediaHandler?id=e2fe5e72-eb14-4bba-b10d-d33dafee8918.

23 Section 12 (1) of the Code of Court Fees (GKG).

24 Directive (EU) 2020/1828 of 25 November 2020 on representative actions for the protection of the collective interests of consumers and repealing Directive 2009/22/EC.

Litigation Funding Overview - Germany