The Case for Funding Climate Litigation the Same Way as Commercial Litigation, and Saying Goodbye to Grants
Written by Lea Nierlich and Tatum Kennedy
Climate litigation is funded one case, one grant, one law firm at a time. Commercial litigation is not.
Somewhere in the commercial litigation world, a firm like Deminor is managing a portfolio spanning dozens of active cases at once, environmental disputes among them, and recovering money in more than 80 percent of them. It does not evaluate each case in isolation, asking whether this one lawsuit alone justifies the money. It builds a portfolio, expects some cases to lose, prices that risk in from the start, and lets the returns from the winners cover the losses. That is, structurally, how venture capital works too: fund many bets, expect most to fail, let a handful of outsized wins carry the portfolio. Climate and public interest litigation is funded almost nothing like this.
How the money actually moves
Philanthropic climate funding is already a thin slice of giving overall, consistently under 2 percent of total global philanthropic dollars in recent years. Legal and governance work is a smaller slice still. And what does flow tends to move the way charitable giving usually moves: a foundation identifies a case or an organization it believes in, writes a grant, and evaluates that grant largely on its own terms. A handful of major foundations, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Hewlett Foundation, the Children's Investment Fund Foundation among them, have funded climate litigation efforts for years this way, often channeling money to specific law firms for specific campaigns.
That model has real strengths, but it has one clear weakness: it makes each case's fate matter enormously, both financially and reputationally, to the funder. When money moves from a nonprofit to a for-profit law firm to underwrite a single litigation campaign, as it has in some prominent climate cases, critics seize on the arrangement itself, calling it opaque or accusing funders of legislating through the courts, regardless of the merits of the underlying claims. A single case, funded and judged on its own, is an easy target in a way a diversified portfolio isn't.
Wins, losses, and what actually counts as a return
Venture capital has a specific answer to the fear of any one bet failing: it does not need every company in the portfolio to succeed. It needs the portfolio, taken together, to succeed. Strategic climate litigation already has an equivalent logic sitting right in front of it, it is just rarely funded as if it does.
In 2021, a Dutch court ordered Shell to cut its emissions by 45 percent, a case widely counted among the most consequential climate rulings to date. In a different case, environmental groups sued to block Norway's oil drilling in the Arctic and lost. Litigation strategists still count it as a meaningful success, because it forced the drilling plans into public scrutiny, shaped how the industry and regulators talked about Arctic exploration afterward, and built a legal record other cases could draw on. Neither the win nor the loss makes sense evaluated purely as an individual bet with a binary payoff. Both only make sense as part of a portfolio, where a loss that shifts the legal or political terrain is still a return, just not a financial one, and where the whole point of spreading bets is that any single case failing does not sink the strategy.
That framing exists in legal strategy circles already. It rarely exists in how the money actually gets committed.
A failed startup simply closes. A lost case at a high court can do something a failed company never does: set bad law, a precedent other courts then have to follow, potentially setting an entire legal strategy back for years. That risk is real, and it is precisely what a portfolio approach, taken seriously, is built to guard against. Spreading cases across different legal theories and jurisdictions is not just about not putting all the capital in one basket. It is about not letting a single unfavorable ruling in one court become the only precedent anyone has to work with, because other cases, built on different legal arguments in different systems, are still moving forward in parallel.
What portfolio funding would actually change
Treating litigation funding like venture capital would not mean asking funders to think more like financiers for its own sake. It would mean three concrete shifts. First, evaluating a slate of cases together, not one grant application at a time, so that a single loss does not read as a failure of the whole strategy, and a single win is not treated as proof a model requires no further support. Second, deliberately funding cases across different legal theories, jurisdictions, and defendants, the same diversification logic that protects a VC fund from a single sector downturn, applied to legal and political risk instead. Third, building structures, funds and vehicles designed to hold a portfolio of cases rather than a single grant relationship, so the fate of any one case is a data point rather than the whole verdict on whether the approach works.
The analogy has a limit worth naming. A venture investor typically expects a board seat and a say in strategy. A lawyer's independence from whoever is paying the bills is not optional, it is a professional and ethical obligation, and legal funding arrangements are generally structured to keep the funder's role to the capital, not the casework: funders price and diversify risk, lawyers make the legal calls. A litigation portfolio can borrow the financial logic of venture capital without importing the governance instincts that go with it.
This is not a hypothetical. Special purpose vehicles built specifically to finance individual climate and environmental lawsuits already exist, precisely because a portfolio structure lets funders back cases that would never attract funding as a standalone bet, the same reason venture portfolios can afford to back the long shots. What is still rare is applying that structure at the scale commercial litigation finance already operates at, treating the full slate of climate accountability cases as one interconnected bet on systemic change, rather than dozens of unconnected ones each waiting to prove itself alone.
That gap has a real cost. Under the one-case-at-a-time model, a case has to justify itself on its own, in its own grant application, to its own funder, before anyone will back it. That is a genuinely high bar for exactly the cases most worth bringing: novel legal theories, unfamiliar jurisdictions, defendants with the resources to make any single case expensive to lose, the ones most capable of setting real precedent and least likely to look fundable in isolation.
Why this matters beyond funding mechanics
This is not just a question of financial efficiency. A portfolio approach does not just spread financial risk. It is one of the few funding models built to actually back the cases that look too risky to fund alone, which are so often the ones capable of setting the precedent everything else depends on.
A case that never gets filed for lack of funding does not just disappear quietly. It is a precedent that never gets set, a violation that goes unanswered, and a signal to whoever caused the harm that accountability is still negotiable. A single successful lawsuit was never going to be enough to change that. What changes is having the capacity to fund the next case, and the one after that, without each one having to win the argument for its own existence first. That is closer to what a portfolio actually buys: not just better odds on any one case, but the standing capacity to keep backing the next one. If you’re interested in exploring different funding models for climate litigation then get in touch with us, because this is our thinking at AllRise.
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Disclaimer: This article was developed with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, which were used to support research, fact-checking, and editorial review. All content has been reviewed and approved by the author(s), who remain responsible for the accuracy, interpretation, and conclusions presented.