Every state should allow Case Equity.

A person with a pending case still owes rent on the first of the month. Nothing about litigation changes that. When the law leaves them no regulated way to access the value of their own case, they do not stop needing money. They take the first lowball offer, or they reach for credit cards and payday products that bill them whether they win or lose.

Whoever can wait longest wins a settlement negotiation. Defendants and insurers can wait years. A plaintiff choosing between groceries and holding out cannot. Consumer legal funding is not a distortion of that market. It is the correction to it.

The strongest objection to funding is real: outside money that buys a stake in a lawsuit, hides its terms, and leans on strategy is bad for plaintiffs and bad for courts. Legislatures should police it. North Carolina just did, with the first outright ban on litigation investment in the country, and it passed 157 to 1.

But read what North Carolina kept. Exclusion (g) of the same statute preserves money provided to a party for personal and household expenses while the case runs, so long as it never touches the fees and costs of the proceeding. The legislature banned money that buys into the lawsuit and, in the same breath, protected money that keeps the plaintiff alive during it. That is not a loophole. That is the line, drawn on purpose.

“The alternative to a regulated lane is not no funding. It is funding nobody can see.”

The 2025-26 wave shows what good rules look like. California requires plain-language contracts and stops charges at 36 months. Georgia requires funder registration, bans referral fees, and forbids any influence over strategy or settlement. New York capped charges outright. The direction is consistent: funding stays legal, opacity does not.

A state that wants to protect plaintiffs should demand four things from consumer funding: the full price disclosed before anyone signs. No stake in the outcome beyond repayment. No influence over the case, the counsel, or the settlement decision. And non-recourse terms, so a lost case costs the plaintiff nothing.

On price itself, we are agnostic about mandates. Sunlight does that work: a published price has to compete, and a hidden one gets to compound. ClaimAngel caps its own cost, by choice, with one set rate of 27.8% simple and a hard cap at 2x that we wrote into our own product. No legislature made us do it. That is the point.

Any state can write those four sentences into law, and any funder unwilling to operate under them has told you what its product is.

Ban litigation investment if the evidence in your state supports it. Register funders. Mandate disclosure. Construe every ambiguity in favor of the consumer. And keep the lane that lets a plaintiff pay rent without selling a winning case for pennies.

Our state-by-state record of what the law actually says, with citations and dates, is at claimangel.com/state-laws. Our position is on every page: the price is public, and the plaintiff comes first. Every state should allow Case Equity. Most already do. The rest should look at what North Carolina kept.