You've seen the ad

You've seen the ad. Late at night, between the reruns, a voice asks whether you or somebody you love lived at Camp Lejeune between 1953 and 1987.

Then a phone number.

I always read those ads as a sign that money was close. Nobody buys television time for a case that pays out in 2032.

I had that backwards.

Congress opened the door on August 10, 2022. The Camp Lejeune Justice Act let people who drank the water on that Marine base sue the federal government for the first time. Up to a million people passed through the base during the years the wells were contaminated.

By the filing deadline, the Navy held 408,500 claims after stripping out duplicates. That number comes from the joint status report the parties filed with the court on July 13 this year.

Now the part that stopped me. As of the June 15 status report, about 2,686 claims had been resolved. Out of roughly 407,000.

Under 1%. Four years in.

Money is moving. The Justice Department reported more than $968 million in settlement offers and more than $801 million actually paid as of July 17. Payments run faster now than at any point since the law passed.

But the queue barely moves. No trial has been held. Not one. The court has not set a date for the first bellwether cases, and the government has asked that the remaining two dozen be positioned to go by the end of this year.

The paperwork screen explains most of it. Only about 11,250 of the claims carry three supporting documents and an illness the fast-track programme will even look at. Of the ones reviewed at that level, the government says more than 88% still lack the proof needed to send them on for approval.

So the file sits. A widow in North Carolina waits. A retired sergeant in Ohio waits.

And here is why it belongs in a markets letter. A claim that will pay someday is an asset. Somebody always lends against an asset… and somebody has.

Law firms pledged their case lists. Injured people pledged their own claims. Both borrowings were priced off an expected payday, and the payday keeps sliding right.

Interest does not wait for a docket.

Every long claim needs somebody to pay the bills while it waits. That somebody is rarely the client.

Plaintiff firms work on contingency. They front the experts, the depositions, the advertising, the medical records. Then they borrow, using their own docket as security. Bloomberg Law described the structure plainly back in 2024: funders lend, firms pledge cases, and the appeal for the lender is a built-in portfolio of hundreds or thousands of claims.

The commercial side of this business is small and well documented. Westfleet Advisors counts 39 active US funders committing $2.8 billion to 346 new deals in 2025. That was a rebound of roughly 23% after two straight years of shrinking, from $3.2 billion in 2022 down to $2.3 billion in 2024.

So capital came back. But look at who stopped using it. The 200 largest US firms took just under a quarter of new commitments in the year to June 30, 2025, down from 37% the year before.

In other words, the borrowers with the strongest balance sheets are stepping back while the money keeps arriving. It has to go somewhere.

Ask people inside the business what they watch and they say the same thing. The head of legal at one London funder told a January survey that time to cash is now the dominant metric, because it drives the return and explains most of the dispersion between funds.

Not whether the case wins. When.

And here is where it spreads. The firm is not the only borrower in the room.

If you are hurt and out of work, a funder will advance you cash today against whatever your case eventually pays. If the case loses, you owe nothing. That single feature is why the product is not a loan.

And because it is not a loan, federal truth-in-lending rules and state usury caps have not applied to it.

New York has now moved. Governor Hochul signed the Consumer Litigation Funding Act on December 19, 2025, a chapter amendment reworked it on February 13, 2026, and the core protections took effect on June 17. The Department of Financial Services now says a funder cannot require a consumer to pay more than 25% of the claim proceeds on top of the amount advanced. Registration with the department starts February 13, 2027.

A state writes a 25% ceiling when it has seen what sits above one.

These advances get packaged too. An investment bank active in the sector counts roughly $2.7 billion of securitisations backed by consumer pre-settlement assets since 2018, across more than 25 deals, alongside money from private equity and credit funds.

So the injured person's wait is now somebody's yield. And the longer she waits, the more of her settlement belongs to someone else before she sees a cent of it.

Meanwhile, in London, the same arithmetic is running at a larger size.

Pogust Goodhead represents hundreds of thousands of Brazilians over the 2015 collapse of the Fundão dam at Mariana, which killed 19 people. The claim against BHP is valued at £36 billion, the largest group action in English legal history.

In October 2023 the firm borrowed $552.5 million from Gramercy Funds Management, understood to be the largest litigation funding deal ever written. In June this year Gramercy added a facility of up to $150 million, with a first tranche of $85 million.

The firm won. Last November the High Court found BHP liable.

Winning did not end the wait. The next phase, on causation and loss, starts in April 2027. BHP said in May that further trials to assess damages are not expected to conclude until 2030 and beyond.

On August 18, City AM reported a second funder had gone to the High Court. Vinci SPS, a Brazilian firm that put up 90.09 million reais for the action, is claiming more than £84 million, plus close to £600,000 of costs. At the centre of it sits a £42.7 million interim costs payment resting in the law firm's client account, which Vinci says should have gone into a designated receivables account. It alleges the firm took more than four and a half years to open one.

Win the case, and the fight over who gets paid first is only starting.

Eleven years after the dam came down, the people it displaced are still waiting. Their lawyers are being sued over a receivables account.

Three more things worth keeping track of this week.

Panama is going shallow again. The canal authority cut the maximum draft through the Neopanamax locks to 48 feet yesterday, with a further cut to 47.5 feet due on September 3. Those are the fourth and fifth reductions of 2026, following 49.5 feet in early July, 49 feet on July 24 and 48.5 feet on August 15. Gatun Lake keeps falling and the US Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of El Niño persisting into early spring at 97%. During the last drought the draft went to 44 feet, daily transits fell from about 40 to the mid-twenties, and the queue passed 160 ships. Every foot of draft costs a container ship several hundred boxes.

Germany is switching off more clean power while needing to switch off less. Montel's data has German commercial curtailment of renewables rising 20% in the first half, from 1,216 gigawatt hours to 1,463, even though hours of negative day-ahead prices fell 23% over the same stretch, from 389 to 299. Fewer hours of surplus, more electricity thrown away. Montel expects a record two terawatt hours for the full year. Spain, by contrast, ran 596 negative-price hours in the first half, the most in Europe.

And Americans keep raiding the retirement account. Vanguard's How America Saves 2026 puts hardship withdrawals at 6% of participants in 2025, up from 4.8% in 2024 and about triple the pre-pandemic rate. That is the sixth annual increase in a row, in a year when the average balance hit a record $167,970. The median withdrawal was $1,900, and it never goes back in. We'll see.

In August 1982 Johns-Manville filed for bankruptcy. The company was profitable. It filed because it had sold asbestos for decades and the lawsuits were arriving faster than it could count them.

The answer the court reached was elegant. Put the company's money and a large slice of its stock into a trust, and let the trust pay every asbestos claim, present and future, forever. Sick people would not have to sue anybody. They would file with the trust and get a cheque.

The Manville trust opened in November 1988. It paid the full liquidated value of each claim, in order of arrival.

It lasted about eighteen months.

In July 1990 Judge Jack Weinstein took jurisdiction and stopped nearly all payments. In November the trust was declared a limited fund, which is the legal way of saying the money will not stretch. Claims had come in at a rate nobody's projections had allowed for.

On January 19, 1995 the judge approved a new distribution plan. Every claimant would now receive the same pro rata share of what their claim was worth. That share was set at 10 cents on the dollar.

In June 2001, after another wave of filings, the trust cut it again. Five cents.

A trust officer told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005 what had happened, and his summary was blunt: twice the trust had been forced to slash its payment percentage, and both times the trigger was a huge unexpected number of claims. From 100% to 10%, then 10% to 5%.

Two men with the same illness, filing four years apart, were paid twenty times differently.

By August 2002 the trust had paid about $2.9 billion to some 500,000 claimants. It is still open today. The pro rata share is 5.1 cents.

Nobody stole the money. The fund was large, the trustees were honest, and the courts supervised every step. The arithmetic simply had two inputs, and only one of them was known.

A pot of money divided by a queue of unknown length is not a promise. It is a ratio.

And the people who got paid in full were the ones who got there first. We'll see.