Aqueous Film-Forming Foams

The AFFF docket combines two distinct claim populations under one MDL: public water providers and municipalities alleging PFAS contamination of drinking-water supplies from firefighting-foam use, and individual claimants — many of them firefighters and other occupationally exposed individuals — alleging personal injury, including certain cancers, from PFAS exposure. That bifurcation matters directly for funding, because the two tracks sit at very different points in their lifecycle: the water-provider track has moved through large negotiated settlements, most notably a roughly $10.3 billion 2023 agreement between 3M and numerous U.S. public water systems, while the personal-injury track remains earlier-stage and less publicly resolved.

For a funder, the personal-injury track is the more directly relevant one: it involves individual claimants with medical records, occupational-exposure histories, and diagnosis timelines rather than municipal plaintiffs with water-testing data. Funding availability there should be evaluated the way any early-to-mid-stage mass tort personal-injury claim is evaluated — on exposure duration and pathway, diagnosis type, and the strength of the individual causal record — rather than assumed to track the municipal settlement's scale or timing, since the two tracks are legally and financially separate.

A law firm building a book of AFFF personal-injury claims, particularly one drawing from firefighter and first-responder client bases, is a natural candidate for portfolio-level financing once enough claims share comparable exposure and diagnosis profiles to support inventory-style underwriting. Medical-lien considerations are meaningful here given how often the alleged injuries involve cancer treatment, and workers'-compensation and health-insurer liens should be modeled early alongside any private health-insurance subrogation exposure. Criterica Capital's mass tort finance product is structured for this kind of occupational-exposure personal-injury claim, distinct from the municipal contamination track running in parallel.

A structural brief separating the litigation's two tracks — available from Criterica Intelligence — is worth reviewing before sizing any AFFF personal-injury inventory.

Pre-settlement funding is a non-recourse purchase of a portion of the proceeds of a pending legal claim — not a loan. If the case does not result in a recovery, nothing is owed. Rates, fees, and repayment terms are disclosed in full in the funding agreement, which the applicant’s attorney reviews before signing. Availability and terms vary by state.