Concrete and Cement Additives

The Concrete and Cement Additives MDL, centralized in the Southern District of New York before Judge Lewis J. Liman in April 2024, is still a relatively young docket — 17 actions currently pending roughly two and a half years into consolidation — which means funders should expect claim files that are earlier in their development than a docket with a decade of discovery behind it. The alleged conduct is coordinated pricing among manufacturers of chemical additives used in concrete and cement production, with the claimant pool made up of concrete producers, construction materials distributors, and other business purchasers of these additives rather than end consumers.

At this stage, funding availability reflects the docket's relative youth: pretrial coordination, the scope of discovery, and the shape of any proposed classes are still being worked out, so claim valuation depends more heavily on the strength of an individual claimant's own purchase records and less on a fully developed common damages model than it would in a mature docket. That is not a reason to avoid funding early-stage claims here, but it does argue for structures that price the earlier-stage uncertainty appropriately rather than assuming the docket-wide certainty of a longer-running case.

For a construction materials purchaser or a firm representing several such purchasers, portfolio finance under Criterica Capital's commercial litigation finance program can be structured around a shared purchase history with the named additive manufacturers, with terms that account for the docket's current procedural stage and the runway remaining before any classwide resolution mechanism could return proceeds. Firms with broader commercial-litigation inventory across multiple young antitrust dockets should also expect a funder to look at how this claim correlates with the rest of the book rather than pricing it in isolation.

This is a commercial purchaser claim with no medical-lien dimension. A structural brief tracking how this docket's pretrial proceedings are developing is available separately through Criterica Intelligence for firms monitoring the litigation before committing capital.

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.