IN RE BROILER CHICKEN ANTITRUST LITIGATION
Chicken producers including Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., Tyson Foods, Inc., and Perdue Farms, Inc. are opposing Sysco Corporation’s attempt to remove itself as a plaintiff in a series of poultry price-fixing lawsuits by substituting a newly created subsidiary of multi-billion-dollar litigation funding firm Burford Capital to take its place. The chicken producers argue in an opposition brief pending in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois that the substitution of plaintiff would constitute “invalid champerty,” an ancient legal doctrine barring the purchase of civil claims by “strangers” and allege that Carina Ventures LLC, which did not exist until “a few weeks ago,” has not met the threshold requirement that “a substantive right at issue survived the transfer,” resulting in an improper transfer of a “champertous nature.”
[To accompany Case Law Update "Chicken Producers Oppose Sysco’s Attempt to Substitute Litigation Funder as Plaintiff in Price-Fixing Litigation” from Brooks Animal Law Digest Issue No. 198]