What a Fundable Case Looks Like, by Vertical

Underwriting inputs are vertical-specific, not universal

In commercial litigation, fundability turns on liability clarity and counterparty solvency ahead of almost everything else. The damages ceiling is usually defined by contract terms or a statutory formula, which means the underwriting question is not "how much could this case be worth" but "what is the number the contract or statute already fixed, and can the defendant actually pay it." A strong liability theory against an insolvent or judgment-proof defendant is not a fundable case, regardless of how clean the breach allegation is. Choice-of-law clauses, forum-selection provisions, and the credibility of the damages model matter more here than case narrative.

Mass tort inverts the unit of underwriting entirely. A single plaintiff's case is rarely underwritten on its own; funders price plaintiff pools and bellwether strategy. The variables that matter are causation science strength, how the MDL judge has ruled on Daubert motions to date, the defendant's revealed settlement posture (early global resolution versus bleed-out litigation), and the structure of any common benefit fund. Fundability is a portfolio-level statistical question aggregated across thousands of claims with correlated exposure to the same causation ruling — not an individual case-by-case underwrite.

Personal injury and consumer claims: liability plus policy limits, not case complexity

Personal injury underwriting starts with liability clarity — police reports, comparative negligence apportionment rules in the venue state, and treatment-gap or pre-existing-condition exposure that a defense expert can use to contest causation. But the number that actually caps recovery in the large majority of these cases is the defendant's insurance policy limit, not injury severity. A catastrophic injury against a minimum-limits policy is a worse funding case than a moderate injury against a commercial umbrella policy, and case narratives that lead with injury severity without stating the policy limit are incomplete underwriting inputs.

Duration behaves differently in this vertical than in commercial litigation. Cases with clear liability against a well-insured defendant in a plaintiff-receptive venue tend to resolve on a compressed timeline because both sides have a strong incentive to settle inside policy limits. Cases against underinsured or uninsured defendants, or filed in defense-favorable venues, extend duration materially — and that extension compresses realized IRR even when the underlying merits assessment does not change. Duration and policy-limit exposure should be underwritten jointly, not as separate line items.

Employment and civil rights: statutory caps and administrative exhaustion

Employment claims carry procedural gates that commercial and PI cases do not: administrative exhaustion through the EEOC or a state fair-employment agency, statutory damages caps that scale with employer headcount under Title VII, and the availability of fee-shifting, which changes the defendant's cost calculus independent of the underlying merits. A claim that has not cleared exhaustion, or that falls under a cap well below the claimed damages, needs to be repriced against the cap — not against the plaintiff's stated ask.

The defendant's incentive structure differs from PI as well. Employers often settle to control reputational exposure and to cap discovery costs — including the cost of producing internal communications — rather than because policy limits are in play. Underwriting inputs that matter here include employer size, prior EEOC charge history for the same manager or location, and venue-level norms on summary judgment grant rates for the specific claim type (discrimination, retaliation, wage-and-hour), which vary meaningfully by circuit and by judge.

IP and antitrust: damages methodology risk dominates the case

In patent and antitrust litigation, the central underwriting risk is not liability — it is whether the damages theory survives expert challenge. Reasonable-royalty and lost-profits methodologies in patent cases, and market-definition and but-for-world modeling in antitrust cases, face Daubert-stage exclusion risk that can zero out a damages theory even when infringement or anticompetitive conduct is well established. Claim construction rulings in patent cases and class certification rulings in antitrust cases function as step-function events: a single ruling can double or eliminate the case's value overnight, rather than shifting it gradually the way settlement negotiations do.

Because value moves in discrete jumps tied to specific procedural milestones rather than drifting continuously, duration-adjusted return modeling for this vertical needs to be built around those milestones directly — claim construction hearing date, class certification briefing schedule — rather than around a generic expected-time-to-resolution curve borrowed from commercial litigation.

Multi-vertical funds need a rubric that adapts, not one applied everywhere

As funds diversify beyond a single vertical, the most common sourcing-team error is applying the heuristics that worked in the fund's original vertical to a new one without adjustment. A team built around commercial litigation intuition tends to underprice mass tort deal flow by underweighting causation science and overweighting individual-case liability narrative, because that is the muscle the team has already built. The fix is not a universal scorecard with vertical as one more field on it; it is a genuinely separate rubric per vertical, built from that vertical's own base rates, reviewed by underwriters who have specifically calibrated against it rather than transferred judgment from elsewhere.

This matters most exactly when deal flow is thin in a fund's core vertical and adjacent-vertical opportunities look attractive by comparison — the moment underpriced adjacent-vertical risk is most likely to get funded, because the alternative is deploying capital more slowly than the fund's return targets assume. A documented, vertical-specific rubric is the discipline that keeps that pressure from becoming a quiet expansion into risk the fund cannot actually underwrite.

What to ask for from an intelligence provider

• 01A case-selection rubric built for your specific vertical, not a generic cross-vertical scorecard relabeled per case type.
• 02The base rate for the exact combination of vertical, jurisdiction, and procedural posture you are underwriting — not a headline "win rate" pooled across unrelated case types.
• 03How duration and the damages ceiling interact in that vertical's outcome distribution, not a point probability presented in isolation.
• 04Disclosure of which underwriting inputs the model treats as vertical-specific versus pooled across verticals, and why.