Corporate & Securities Law

Bryan Cave presents survey on euro-class actions

By Werner R. Kranenburg

Today the Economist Intelligence Unit published a survey entitled Collective litigation in Europe, sponsored by Bryan Cave LLP. (Financial Times) Some of the results echo those of the Legal Week/EJ Legal Big Question survey on the same topic, published last month (see previous post).

For example, the Client Bulletin that introduces the survey (same link as above) says that “[collective l]itigation is expected to arise from product liability (67%), cartel and price-fixing (38%) and shareholder rights disputes (28%),” (see survey pp.3, 4) which corresponds with the outcome of the Legal Week survey results.

The major difference though is in the type of respondent: this one surveyed ‘European lawyers and business executives’ and not exclusively the ‘UK legal community’ which the survey itself notes has an impact on some of the findings. The bulletin continues:

Europeans are far from eager to adopt US class action procedures, and reject many features of the American system. However, 60% of respondents expect that legal fees will become linked in some way to the outcome of cases in Europe, and 43% expect to see the introduction of contingency fees for lawyers as a percentage of court judgments. (See survey p.5 and Q7, p.14)

Number of times the term ‘litigation funding’ appears in the survey however: naught. (Subscribe)

What’s more: Lawrence Scarborough has followed up his firm’s survey with an article in Legal Week this week (issue of 8 November), entitled Europe should face up to US-style litigation, in which he discusses some of the survey’s findings. He concludes with his opinion:

In my opinion, corporate Europe would be advised to consider whether any of the proactive mechanisms put to the survey respondents might benefit their own businesses in coping with what is clearly an escalating risk.

Full post as published by With Vigour and Zeal on October 30, 2007 (boomark / email).