A litigation funder sank more than $140 million into a price-fixing fight, then refused to let the company it bankrolled walk away with $50 million, and a circuit judge wrote a concurrence to call the courtroom a trading floor.
On February 5, 2026, in Chicago, Circuit Judge Nancy L. Maldonado wrote a separate concurrence to say out loud what the majority opinion had left between the lines. "Having turned the courtroom into a trading floor, and calculated that continued litigation was more profitable than settlement, Burford wrested total control over the settlement of Sysco's claims." She was describing a litigation funder that had sunk more than $140 million into a price-fixing fight and then refused to let the company it bankrolled walk away with $50 million.
The case is Carina Ventures LLC v. Pilgrim's Pride Corp., No. 25-1110, an appeal that grew out of the sprawling Broiler Chicken antitrust litigation in the Northern District of Illinois. Carina Ventures is a Burford Capital affiliate. It now holds claims that once belonged to Sysco, the food distributor that says it overpaid for chicken in a rigged market. The story of how a funder ended up litigating in the injured party's chair is the story of a single contract clause.
Sysco took Burford's money under a Capital Provision Agreement. The terms gave Burford a share of any favorable proceeds across the Broilers, Pork, and Beef cases. They also gave Burford a leash. Sysco, the agreement read, "shall not accept a settlement offer without [Burford Capital's] prior written consent, which shall not be unreasonably withheld." On paper that reads like a routine investor protection. In practice it was a veto.
In late August 2022 Sysco negotiated a deal. It would resolve the Broilers case against Pilgrim's Pride for $50 million. Sysco told Burford. Burford thought the number was too low and withheld its consent. Then it went further. Burford filed a Request for Arbitration to block Sysco from settling, moving to stop the company from executing the very deal it had struck. The party that had been wronged in the chicken market wanted out. The party that had written the checks would not let it leave.
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Maldonado, writing only for herself, did not soften the diagnosis. "This case presents perhaps the foremost danger of litigation finance: funders aggressively interfering with, and exerting control over, ongoing litigation, while rejecting the funded party's preferences with the hope of maximizing returns." She put the financial motive in plain words. Carina's appeal, which is to say Burford's, was in her reading "motivated far more by its speculative financial investment than by a desire to seek justice for Sysco, the true injured party." Sysco, she noted, said it was "forced to indefinitely litigate against its will against key suppliers who have offered fair and reasonable settlement payments."
The majority got Sysco the same result by a colder route. Judge David F. Hamilton, joined by Judge Frank Easterbrook, did not hold that a funder's veto voids a settlement. He held that no binding settlement had formed at all. Material terms were still open when the parties shook hands, so there was nothing yet to enforce. On that footing the panel reversed the summary judgment that Judge Thomas M. Durkin had entered below, the order that would have locked Sysco into the deal. The result and the reasoning split. Hamilton freed Sysco on contract law. Maldonado used her separate pages to name the funder mechanic the contract-law holding never reached.
That distinction matters to anyone watching where funder-control law goes next. A circuit majority declined to rule that a consent veto, by itself, strips a settlement of force. The hard line came in a concurrence, which binds no one. What the funder did was unwound on narrower grounds, and the broadest reading of the conduct sits in a single judge's separate opinion. The clause that let Burford block a $50 million deal is still, as a matter of holding, just a clause.
A funder bought a veto with a wire transfer. A judge called it a trading floor. The investor is still in the chair.
The numbers are the part that travels. More than $140 million in. A $50 million settlement frozen. Years of extra litigation against suppliers who had already offered to pay. Sysco ended up assigning its claims to the Burford affiliate, so the funder now litigates in the seat of the company it once merely backed. Maldonado called the whole arc "a cautionary tale to any party who seeks to fund its litigation through a third party."
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