One Judgment, No Rulebook, and India's First Dedicated Fund
Investors in India are starting to pay for other people's lawsuits in exchange for a slice of the eventual award. The Supreme Court cleared the way in 2018, a Mumbai alternative investment fund is raising the country's first dedicated vehicle at $25–50 million, and the Delhi High Court has drawn the only hard line that exists. What India still does not have: a statute, a regulator, or any rule requiring a funded party to say it is funded.
As of 31 December 2025
Five Rivers, in talks to close
non-lawyer funding
Bar Council of India v. A.K. Balaji
regulating funders
No framework under consideration
- It is legal. No Indian statute prohibits a third party from funding someone else's claim. The Supreme Court said as much in Bar Council of India v. A.K. Balaji (2018): advocates cannot fund their clients, but non-lawyers face no such bar.
- Money is arriving. Mumbai-based AIF Five Rivers is in talks to close India's first dedicated litigation fund at $25–50 million. LegalPay and Singapore's ELF Partners have worked the space as intermediaries for several years.
- The one hard line. In Tomorrow Sales Agency v. SBS Holdings (2023), the Delhi High Court refused to make a non-recourse funder pay the costs of a lost arbitration. A funder that is not a party cannot be dragged into the award.
- Where the deals are. Arbitration and insolvency, not ordinary civil suits. Both have defined timelines, sophisticated counterparties and a realistic shot at actually collecting.
- What is missing. No central statute, no regulator, no capital requirement, and no obligation on a funded party to tell the other side it is funded. The government has twice told Parliament it has no plans to change that.
A Backlog Problem Dressed Up as a Balance-Sheet Problem
The customer is a company with a strong claim and no appetite to fund it for three years
| Figure | What It Is | As Of |
|---|---|---|
| 5.39 crore | Cases pending across the Supreme Court, High Courts and district courts, per the Law Ministry's reply in the Lok Sabha | 31 Dec 2025 |
| 4.76 crore | Of those, the share sitting in district and subordinate courts | 31 Dec 2025 |
| 93,143 | Supreme Court pendency — the highest in three decades | Mar 2026 |
| $25–50 mn | Target size of Five Rivers' first fund, India's first dedicated litigation vehicle | Jun 2026 |
| ₹1 crore | Minimum ticket for an Indian AIF, which is how retail money is kept out | Statutory |
| ~$29 bn | Estimated global litigation funding market — one vendor's number among several | 2026 |
Treat that last figure with suspicion. Published estimates of the global market for 2025–26 range from roughly $17 billion to $29 billion depending on who is counting and what they count as "funding." For India there is no credible number at all: participants are bound by confidentiality agreements and will not disclose case-level detail, so nobody can size the deal flow.
If you are an investor, the honest summary is a market with no published track record, no benchmark return and no index. If you are a company with a claim, the relevant number is not the market size — it is how many years your matter will take, because that is what the funder is pricing.