Antitrust Litigation Finance: Funding Competition Law Claims

How funders approach cartel, monopolization, and class claims, including the damages methodologies that drive recovery.

Antitrust litigation finance supports claims brought under the Sherman Act, the Clayton Act, and parallel state competition laws. These cases include cartel claims alleging price-fixing or bid-rigging among competitors, monopolization claims challenging exclusionary conduct by dominant firms, and class actions on behalf of direct or indirect purchasers harmed by anticompetitive behavior. Antitrust cases are among the most expensive and document-intensive in commercial litigation, which makes external capital particularly valuable to claimants pursuing them.

Cartel cases often benefit from the treble damages provision of the antitrust laws, which allows a successful plaintiff to recover three times its proven damages plus attorney fees. This multiplier substantially increases expected recovery and is a meaningful factor in funder underwriting. Cases that follow government enforcement actions, where a criminal conviction or guilty plea has already established the conspiracy, carry lower liability risk and are correspondingly attractive. Funders distinguish carefully between follow-on claims with established liability and standalone claims that must prove the conspiracy from scratch.

Class certification and damages methodology dominate the risk analysis. In purchaser class actions, certification depends on demonstrating that antitrust impact and damages can be proven on a classwide basis through common evidence, often a regression model estimating the overcharge attributable to the anticompetitive conduct. The Comcast decision sharpened the scrutiny courts apply to whether damages models match the theory of liability. Funders assess whether the plaintiff's economic model can withstand Daubert challenges and survive the rigorous certification analysis courts now require.

Collectability is rarely the binding constraint in antitrust cases, because defendants are typically large, solvent corporations. The binding constraints are duration and complexity. Antitrust litigation routinely runs many years through extensive discovery, expert reports, certification battles, and appeals. Funders model this long horizon explicitly, because the time to resolution compounds the required return and because intervening rulings can sharply revalue the claim at multiple points along the way.

Criterica Capital underwrites antitrust claims using outcome data drawn from 106M+ court records, allowing us to calibrate liability and certification probability against the history of comparable competition cases. This produces pricing grounded in observed outcomes rather than in the reputation of the litigation team. Firms and corporate claimants pursuing antitrust claims can contact our institutional team for a confidential assessment.

Discuss your matter with our institutional team.