Please read carefully: This is a special note addressing why the lawsuit funding industry as a whole (including our company) rarely funds cases that involve minors.
If you have a lawsuit involving a minor and you are seeking funding on the case, you likely have been declined for funding and do not understand why. We will try to explain why here.
For the most part, minors are those who are under the age of 18 years. And, legally speaking, minors are not able to enter into binding written contracts. That is one of the legal characteristics defining a minor. Therefore, if we were to approve a lawsuit for funding where the plaintiff was a minor, that contract would NOT be legally binding. So for example, if the minor broke the signed contract with us and refused to pay-us back, there would nothing we could do about it, because minors are not legally able to enter into binding contracts in the first place. So any contract agreed to, would not be legally binding. Therefore any such contract would be worthless. This is why for example, minors cannot purchase real estate, because they cannot enter into meaningful contracts. So for this reason, companies within our industry will not invest into cases where the injured party (plaintiff) is a minor. Why? Because minors are not legally able to enter into binding contracts.
Also depending upon the age of the minor, it can also be argued that the minor does not have enough real life experience to completely understand a contract. And therefore has no real business entering into a contract.
And the main counter argument to the above point, that parents of minors often bring up, is the following: parents often will say to us, “as parents of the injured child, we understand that our child is not legally able to enter any binding agreements, but that’s OK, because as the parents, we are also named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, that is, we the parents are named in the lawsuit as plaintiffs, in addition to our injured child, so you can just advance us the money based on us and not our child’s part of the case.” We get hear that reasoning all the time.
While this if often true in these types of lawsuits, we still CANNOT fund the parents. And here’s the reason why: when these types of cases go to trial, the child will often be awarded a significant judgment but the parent’s claims are often not awarded a judgment at all or their judgment is very small in comparison to what is awarded the child. Therefore, investing into the parent’s claims is just way too risky for us the investor.
Additionally, to make matter even more complicated, even if the parent was to be awarded a significant judgment amount, the court almost always restricts the parent in how they can use the judgment proceeds. That is, the court will often restrict the judgment proceeds to be used only for the benefit of the child. Such as paying for college, food, clothes, etc. And such a restriction for us the investor, is a deal killer for us, because it makes investing into the case too risky.
There is potentially one way around this issue. And this is to have a probate / family court judge approve the details of any prospective funding agreement (contract) between the parents and us. So if a judge approves our funding agreement, such that we feel comfortable that we will be repaid back when the case wins, we can in theory fund cases involving minors.
But in reality, this almost never happens for several reasons. First, for this to occur, your attorney would have to prepare a motion to present to the judge. Your attorney would charge you extra fees for doing this and your attorney will rarely agree to do this. Secondly, this adds considerable time to the funding process, typically between 30 and 90 days (time to prepare the documents, and time to be heard in front of the judge). And this possible solution does involve risk as well, because there is no guarantee the judge will approve the funding agreement. So it’s possible to jump through these extra hoops just to have the motion denied by the judge.
Note: Adults with severe mental limitations are often regarded in a similar fashion as minors. That is, if your case involves an adult who is mentally handicap, we often cannot fund such cases, for the same reasons we cannot fund cases involving minors.
However, emancipated minors, CAN legally enter into binding written contracts and we CAN potentially fund a case, where the minor has been emancipated. An emancipated minor is a minor who has the legal rights of an adult, typically through approval of a court or if the minor was married and divorced before age 18.
Also, if an incident occurred while the plaintiff was a minor, but now the plaintiff is an adult, we can and often do fund such cases. For example, we just funded a case where the plaintiff was assaulted in shop class in high school but is now an adult.
In any event, if you have a case that involves a minor, we and everyone else within our industry likely cannot help you and we are terribly sorry for that. Please contact us with any further questions.
- Eric