SSB Law’s funding chain produces its first big claim this week, with funder Katch suing an after-the-event insurer for £19.5m, while Walter Merricks and Innsworth end their dispute over the £200m Mastercard settlement, clearing the way for at least £100m to reach consumers. In the personal injury market, Minster Law’s purchase of ARAG Law’s PI business extends a rapid consolidation.
SSB funder issues £19.5m claim against ATE insurer
Katch Fund Solutions, which was owed £63m when SSB Law entered administration in January 2024, has taken an assignment of the collapsed firm’s own claim from its administrators and issued Commercial Court proceedings against Stonefort Insurance S.A. (formerly Builders Direct S.A.), a Luxembourg company. According to the claim form as reported by the Law Society Gazette, Stonefort was paid £19.5m in premiums from 2020 onwards for after-the-event policies covering SSB’s cavity wall insulation claims, none of which succeeded or qualified as a win under the clients’ conditional fee agreements. Katch alleges the insurer was never truly at risk under the policies yet kept the premiums, unjustly enriching itself at SSB’s expense. The allegations are untested and Stonefort has yet to respond.
The claim is the funding-chain sequel to a scandal we covered through the Legal Services Consumer Panel’s single-regulator paper, and the SRA maintains a dedicated information page for former SSB clients still facing costs demands.
How does the Merricks funding dispute end?
Walter Merricks announced on 6 August that he has resolved all differences with Innsworth, the funder of his collective action against Mastercard, which has dropped the arbitration proceedings it brought against him personally and accepted £62.6m plus interest from the settlement proceeds. The settlement itself was £200m, against a claim originally pleaded at roughly £14bn, and the Competition Appeal Tribunal’s distribution ruling survived Innsworth’s judicial review challenge when the Divisional Court dismissed it in June.
Distribution can now begin: the first £100m is reserved for consumers who make a valid claim, each receiving at least £45 on Mr Merricks’s figures, with unclaimed sums passing to the Access to Justice Foundation. After nearly ten years of litigation, first against Mastercard and then against his own funder, the largest sum ever secured for UK consumers through group litigation is finally moving. The procedural history sits on the CAT’s case page.
Minster Law buys ARAG’s personal injury business
Minster Law has acquired the personal injury business of ARAG Law, taking on around 30 people and their active caseload and opening a new Bristol office close to ARAG’s headquarters to house them. The Wakefield firm, part of the BHL insurance group, reported turnover of £43m for the year to 30 June 2025 and has said it intends to more than double that to £100m within five years, with acquisitions doing much of the work; this is its second PI book purchase after Irwin Mitchell’s high-volume business in 2022. ARAG Law, known as DAS Law until the ARAG Group bought DAS UK in 2024, keeps its wider 200-person legal business.
The deal is the third significant PI transaction in a fortnight, in a market where claim volumes keep falling, and it follows the regulatory attention on the claims sector we reported when the FCA launched its claims management review. The Gazette’s report carries both firms’ statements.
Funder-versus-insurer litigation over failed ATE cover is the predictable second act of the SSB collapse, and its outcome will shape how funders price disbursement lending across the claims sector. For PI practitioners, the direction of travel is fewer, larger, more specialist firms.