Insights

London – October 15, 2026: Chambers and Partners has recognized five Crowell & Moring U.K. LLP lawyers across six practice areas in the Chambers UK 2027 Guide, including new rankings for Tom Dell'Avvocato and Chiraag Shah and ranking advancements for Chiraag Shah and Emma Wright.

London – October 2, 2026: Crowell & Moring has earned recognition across four practice areas in the Legal 500 United Kingdom 2027 rankings and has been named a Firm to Watch for Data Protection, Privacy and Cybersecurity and PATMA: Patent attorneys.

London – July 29, 2026 [Updated Aug. 26, 2026]: Crowell & Moring's London Restructuring and Insolvency team has been appointed by Kroll Advisory in the administration of Woodville Consultants Limited (trading as Woodville Litigation Funding), a motor finance litigation funder with an estimated £330m loan book and more than 300,000 claims under its belt. The team first acted for a group of investors in successfully securing a contested administration order from the High Court and has since been retained by Kroll to assist in the wider administration process.

Introduced to Parliament on 19 May 2026, the Commercial Payments Bill represents a significant reform to payment legislation. Targeting a problem that costs the economy £11 billion per year, the Bill introduces a package of hard-edged protections that businesses cannot avoid through contract.

In a previous client alert on a recent Civil Justice Council (“CJC”) report on litigation funding in England and Wales we discussed the issue of whether payment waterfalls providing funders with payment priority are compliant with the Damages-Based Agreements Regulations 2013 (“DBA Regulations”), the issue being a matter to be heard on appeal in June 2025. Funders will be pleased to hear that the answer is “yes”. The Court of Appeal has held that the DBA Regulations focuses on whether a funding agreement determines the amount of a funder’s fees by reference to the damages awarded to the successful litigant. The fact that a funder may receive its fees from the proceeds is not enough in itself for the arrangement to fall under the DBA Regulations.

The amount of litigation regarding environmental and climate change issues is, perhaps unsurprisingly, growing worldwide.[1] A significant portion of that litigation relates to so-called ‘greenwashing’, ‘climate-washing’ or ‘social-washing’ disputes. In other words, legal cases where people or organisations (often NGOs and consumer groups) accuse companies, banks, financial institutions or others, of making untrue statements. They argue these companies or financial institutions are pretending their products, services or operations are more environmentally-friendly, sustainable, or ethically ‘good’ for society – than is really the case. Perhaps more interestingly, of all the litigation in the environmental and climate change space – complainants bringing greenwashing and social washing cases have, according to some of these reports, statistically the most chance of winning. So, in a nutshell, not only is greenwashing and social washing litigation on the rise, companies and financial institutions are most likely to lose cases in this area.

In today's mid-market, collateral is a dynamic, actively managed asset that can generate liquidity, reduce funding costs, unlock liability management options, and — in the wrong hands — erode a creditor's recovery without a single covenant being breached. Collateral enhancement has become a strategic imperative for borrowers, lenders, and specialty finance providers alike. It has also become a restructuring tool of the first order — one that skilled debt advisers and lawyers are increasingly deploying to shape outcomes that would previously have required formal insolvency proceedings.