Ohio’s lawmakers are moving a bill that will unintentionally shield woke corporations and entrenched bureaucracies from legal accountability. As House Bill 105 sits in the Ohio Senate’s Judiciary Committee after clearing the House, supporters describe it as a transparency measure for third‑party litigation finance.
In practice, this proposal risks disarming some of the very legal organizations that conservatives rely on to challenge institutions like Planned Parenthood, corporate DEI and ESG policies, and government overreach when those fights reach the courts. It does so by tightening the rules around a tool that often makes those cases possible in the first place: litigation finance.
I have spent decades in Ohio’s conservative movement, and I know the difference between a legal reform that protects citizens and one that ends up burdening the people doing the hardest work. HB 105 is well‑intentioned, but it is aimed at the wrong problem.
If Republicans want a real tort‑reform legacy, they should focus less on broadly tightening litigation finance and more on stopping the weaponization of public nuisance law and other forms of ideological lawfare that drag energy companies, gun manufacturers, automakers, and other lawful industries into court as stand‑ins for political debates they could not win at the ballot box.
By contrast, litigation finance is often the only way citizens and conservative causes can afford to push back. In a world where deep‑pocketed institutions can drag out litigation for years, access to funding can mean the difference between enforcing your rights and surrendering on cost alone.
Whether it is a parent fighting a radical school policy or a small business fighting to defend its existence, litigation finance offers ordinary Americans and small organizations with fewer resources the ability to hold entrenched interests accountable. It has become a lifeline for conservative efforts against woke corporations and ideological institutions, helping to support challenges to discriminatory DEI and ESG policies and to defend conservatives targeted by leftwing lawfare.
HB 105 moves in the opposite direction. It creates a dense new regulatory and disclosure regime for non‑recourse litigation funding agreements, and supporters point to consumer protection concerns. On paper, that sounds like a measured effort to clean up a murky corner of the legal world. In the real world, broad and recurring disclosure rules are far more likely to burden smaller conservative legal groups and movement‑aligned nonprofits than the large, well‑capitalized legal institutions of the left.
Leftwing organizations like Lambda Legal, which has fought to allow the transgender sterilization of children, have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to support their legal efforts. Those groups would not be impacted by this law, and instead conservative legal organizations that have turned to litigation finance to sustain legal battles against major institutions will be undermined before a case is even fully underway.
That exposure is the point for many adversaries. The disclosure mechanisms in HB 105 closely resemble other mandated-disclosure schemes that conservatives have long fought to dismantle as threats to Americans’ privacy. In these cases, defendants – including woke institutions and progressive activists – can easily weaponize disclosure to intimidate supporters, cut off resources, and paint such cases as illegitimate.
Conservatives should not casually support rules that make it easier for opponents to identify and target those backing challenges to progressive orthodoxies. Gene Hamilton, former Deputy White House Counsel to President Trump, has likewise warned that this kind of legislation can end up bolstering the very corporations pushing progressive agendas by choking off the capital conservatives use to challenge them. Lawmakers, both in Washington and Ohio, should take that warning seriously.
If my fellow Ohio Republicans want to take on abusive litigation, they should cut off the head of the snake by directly tackling politicized lawfare campaigns rather than a legal resource that helps ordinary Americans get their day in court. HB 105, no matter how well-intentioned, risks making life easier for the corporations whose woke policies have harmed American consumers and Ohioans.
