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Twenty-three years is an unusual definition of efficient justice. Yet that is the striking backdrop to the UK Supreme Court’s recent decision in the AXA case. The case stems from a Group Litigation Order (GLO) established back in 2003 to coordinate claims by companies challenging aspects of the UK tax regime. AXA was not selected as a test case. Its claim was stayed while other proceedings made their way through the courts – a process involving multiple levels of the UK judiciary and the European courts. The GLO may have avoided multiple parties litigating the same questions separately, but for an individual claimant it also meant years of waiting. That exposes a tension in how we think about the efficiency of collective litigation. A procedure can be efficient for the court system while being remarkably inefficient for the individual claimant. Reducing the number of hearings and avoiding duplication is valuable, but so is reaching a resolution within a reasonable timeframe. From a claimant’s perspective, a dispute that remains unresolved for years carries its own costs – financial, commercial and simply the uncertainty of not knowing when the matter will finally end. The difficulty is that these different forms of efficiency do not always point in the same direction. What may be the most efficient way for a court to determine a common issue may not be the quickest route for every claimant whose case depends on that issue. The AXA litigation therefore raises a broader question about how we measure the success of GLOs. If collective litigation is intended to deliver efficient justice, perhaps efficiency should be measured not only by how much litigation is avoided, but also by how long claimants have to wait. Perhaps, then, the more useful question is not simply whether collective litigation is efficient, but efficient for whom? After all, justice may be collective. The waiting is not.
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Coles got caught. Then the class action’s damages case got so tangled that a Federal Court judge openly admitted he can’t follow it. Welcome to “access to justice.” In May 2026, Australia’s Federal Court found supermarket giant Coles misled shoppers on 13 of 14 “Down Down” tickets — prices quietly bumped up, then “slashed” back down to fake a bargain. A clean liability win. A genuine black eye for Coles. Then came the damages phase. And the very same judge who wrote a razor-sharp 500-paragraph liability ruling is now, by this week’s reporting, openly struggling to understand how the class action even calculates what shoppers are owed. If the bench can’t follow the math, what chance do you have of seeing a cent? Liability was the easy part Proving Coles fooled the market? Manageable. Proving what each shopper lost? A nightmare. Across 245 products and 15 months of millions of anonymous transactions, “your loss” stops being a fact and becomes a statistical guess — sampling, regressions, and assumptions stacked on assumptions. When a judge says he can’t follow it, that’s the model waving a white flag. Your “class” includes people who lost basically nothing Bought one Cadbury bar during the window? You’re lumped in with someone who did weekly big-basket shops for a year and a half. Average that out and you get a number that satisfies a formula — not a number that reflects what anyone actually lost. Good luck getting paid Nobody kept four-year-old receipts. So payouts get estimated, or funnelled off to unrelated “cy-près” causes when real victims can’t be found. The money drifts away from the people it was for. Everyone gets paid before you do Funders don’t take risk for charity. Between funding commissions, legal fees and admin costs, a fat slice of any award is spoken for before a single shopper sees a dollar. The headline figure and the cash in your pocket are two very different numbers. Four years and counting Conduct: 2022–2023. Liability: May 2026. Damages: still being fought in August 2026 — appeals looming. For a few dollars of loss per product, that’s not justice. That’s a machine that pays the funders, the firms and the lawyers, and hands the shopper the scraps. If the judge is lost, so is your payout!
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We wrote recently about the £200 million Mastercard settlement and the strange maths behind its “£45–£70” headline. Spread across the roughly 44 million people the case was brought on behalf of, the settlement works out at only a few pounds per person. Now the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has published something that makes the Mastercard story look less like an isolated oddity and more like part of a much bigger problem. The regulator has been building a programme of work around high-volume consumer claims (HVCC) – cases where large numbers of consumers pursue similar claims against the same organisation, often through “no-win, no-fee” arrangements. The SRA’s position is fairly simple. When these cases work properly, they can widen access to justice. When they don’t, the sheer number of consumers involved means the problems get bigger too. And although Mastercard itself isn’t a case about a firm of solicitors behaving badly, many of the problems the SRA is worried about are remarkably familiar. Start with the money Merricks’ legal team reportedly billed more than £18 million over the course of the case. Mastercard’s own legal costs have never been made public. For the consumers supposedly at the centre of proceedings, there is very little visibility over what all that litigation actually cost, who ultimately paid for it, or whether those costs were proportionate to what consumers eventually received. That question of transparency is one of the SRA’s central concerns in high-volume claims: consumers need to understand the costs, fees and financial arrangements sitting behind a claim supposedly being pursued in their interests. But the Mastercard case becomes more revealing when you look at who financed it. Then there’s the funder The case was backed by litigation funder Innsworth Capital. That arrangement mattered because bringing a claim of this size requires enormous amounts of money. A funder takes that risk in return for a share of the proceeds if the case succeeds. The problem comes when the interests of the funder and the interests of the consumers stop pointing in the same direction. That is essentially what happened here. Innsworth had expected a settlement of roughly £400 million. When Merricks agreed to settle with Mastercard for £200 million instead, Innsworth opposed the deal. The Competition Appeal Tribunal approved it anyway. The dispute didn’t end there. Innsworth challenged the outcome and entered arbitration with Merricks over the funding agreement. So a case that began as an attempt to recover money for consumers ended with a fight between the person representing those consumers and the company that financed him. That is exactly the kind of tension the SRA is now looking at. The regulator is consulting on new rules governing how solicitors deal with third-party litigation funding because it is concerned that poorly structured arrangements can threaten the stability of claims and produce outcomes that do not serve consumers well. And the final numbers in Mastercard show why those incentives matter. Follow where the money goes Innsworth is expected to receive close to £68 million. Meanwhile, the case was brought on behalf of roughly 44 million consumers. The settlement does provide for individual payments considerably higher than a couple of pounds for people who successfully claim. But measured against the size of the class the case was originally brought to represent, the £200 million settlement amounts to only a few pounds per person. That contrast is difficult to ignore. After years of litigation, tens of millions in legal and funding costs and a £200 million settlement, one of the largest clearly identifiable beneficiaries is the litigation funder. The SRA lists financial loss to consumers and loss of trust in legal services among the potential harms it sees in the high-volume claims market. You can see why. And Mastercard isn’t the only place this is happening The same questions are now appearing in another enormous consumer compensation story: motor finance. The FCA has been trying to establish a redress scheme for people who may have been overcharged because of historic motor finance commission arrangements. It estimates the scheme could return around £7.5 billion to roughly 12 million eligible agreements. But the scheme has become tied up in legal challenges. That delay matters because there is already an industry of claims management companies and law firms offering to pursue motor finance compensation on consumers’ behalf. The SRA has warned about firms cold-calling consumers, misleading them about likely compensation and, crucially, failing to make clear that there may be a free route to redress. That creates an obvious gap. A regulator says consumers may be entitled to compensation and wants to provide a route for them to receive it without paying a claims company. The official process slows down. Consumers become uncertain about when — or whether — they will be paid. Into that uncertainty step firms offering to handle the claim for them, in return for a cut. The longer the official route takes, the more attractive that offer becomes. That’s the bigger story None of this means Mastercard, Merricks, Innsworth or the firms involved broke the rules. And the SRA has not made a regulatory finding about the Mastercard case. In some ways, that is precisely why its latest work is interesting. The regulator is looking at whether the rules themselves do enough to protect consumers when litigation funding, legal fees and mass claims all collide. Its consultation on third-party litigation funding, open until 17 September 2026, asks what obligations solicitors should have when they use or arrange funding and how consumers can be better protected when those financial arrangements start influencing a claim. Mastercard and motor finance are very different cases. But they expose the same uncomfortable question. When a system designed to get compensation to millions of consumers becomes slow, complicated and expensive, who is best positioned to benefit from that complexity? Increasingly, the answer can be the people financing, managing and pursuing the claims rather than the consumers the system was built for. That is the weak spot the SRA is
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Britain’s class action market is booming. Consumers are increasingly familiar with advertisements promising compensation for everything from car finance and data breaches to defective products and competition claims. Behind many of these cases sits another rapidly expanding industry: third-party litigation funding. A new Civitas report, Litigation Nation: The growth of a class action claims culture, raises important questions about where this is heading. The concern is not simply about individual lawsuits, but the emergence of a more commercialised litigation market in which legal claims themselves can become investment opportunities. The scale of the change is striking. According to figures reported by The Telegraph, third-party litigation funding grew by more than 1,000 per cent, from around £198 million in 2011 to £2.2 billion in 2022. The question is whether transparency, regulation and consumer protection have kept pace.
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After almost a decade of litigation, millions of UK consumers are finally moving toward compensation from Mastercard. But the headline figure being reported — £45 to £70 per person — only tells half the story. The Real Math Half the £200 million settlement — £100 million — is set aside for the roughly 44 million eligible UK consumers. Split evenly, that’s just over £2 each. The widely quoted £45–£70 range only works if around 5% of people actually claim, which is typical for opt-out settlements but a low bar for something marketed as compensation. The case originally sought £14 billion; the £200 million settlement Mastercard agreed to, without admitting liability, is 1.4% of that. A Funder That Sued Its Own Client Litigation funder Innsworth Capital tried to block class representative Walter Merricks from accepting the £200 million deal, arguing it fell short of the roughly £400 million return its funding agreement had envisaged. When the Tribunal approved the settlement anyway, Innsworth took Merricks to arbitration — the funder suing the very man it was funding. Mastercard, the defendant, then stepped in to give Merricks up to £10 million to defend himself against his own backer. That dispute has just been resolved: Innsworth dropped the arbitration and accepted £62.6 million plus interest, on top of tens of millions more owed from the settlement pot. A funder suing the person it bankrolled, over how much of consumers’ money it gets to keep, says a lot about whose interests these cases really serve. Where the Rest of the Money Went Merricks’ legal team is reported to have billed more than £18.1 million. Mastercard’s own legal costs, never published, could be higher still. Innsworth stands to collect close to £68 million in total. Merricks himself, who led the case for eight years, was paid £143,000 for the entire period — under £18,000 a year. Out of a £200 million settlement meant to compensate consumers for years of overcharging, lawyers and a litigation funder are set to collect tens of millions of pounds — while the 44 million people the case was actually brought for split a pot worth roughly £2 a head, before the claims discount even kicks in. Watch Out for Scams Be wary of unsolicited texts, emails and social ads promising “Mastercard compensation.” A company mentioning the settlement isn’t necessarily connected to the official claim. Nobody should feel pressured to sign agreements, hand over financial details, or pay someone simply because they’re told compensation might be waiting. Nearly ten years and £200 million later, the people who were actually overcharged are being asked to settle for a couple of pounds each, while the funder and the lawyers fight over tens of millions. If group litigation is going to mean anything for ordinary consumers, cases like this one need to put real money in real people’s hands — not just fund everyone standing between the claim and the claimant. Further Reading Official claims site: mastercardconsumerclaim.co.uk The £2.27-a-head maths and legal fees: Fair Civil Justice — Merricks v Mastercard: Who Really Wins in This Settlement? Latest on the Innsworth dispute: Legal Futures — Merricks and funder settle with consumers set for Mastercard money
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Every major consumer scandal now follows a depressingly familiar script. A corporate wrongdoing comes to light. Regulators begin investigating. Consumers start asking legitimate questions about their rights. And almost immediately, an army of claims management companies, lead generators and marketing firms descends, competing not to deliver justice but to acquire claimants. The car finance scandal is proving no different. This week, the Information Commissioner's Office executed search warrants at properties linked to five companies as part of an investigation into suspected unlawful marketing connected to motor finance claims. According to the regulator, businesses under investigation are believed to have sent around 170 million unsolicited text messages in just eight months, prompting more than 12 million complaints from members of the public.
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