Litigation is a long game. Here is what 112 concluded cases achieved — and what it means to count a win.
Resolved between FY2016 and June 2025.
71% of all concluded funded cases.
From filing to final resolution.
Public settlements only. (Placeholder.)
We code an outcome as favorable when the class obtained meaningful relief: a judgment, a settlement with monetary or injunctive terms, or a policy change adopted before judgment.
By that standard, 79 of 112 concluded cases — 71% — ended favorably. Dismissals and losses are reported, not buried: 19 cases ended without relief, and 14 remain on appeal. Outcome rates were remarkably stable across issue areas, varying by no more than six points between the strongest and weakest category.
Monetary relief is only part of the ledger. Forty-one favorable outcomes included injunctive terms — a rebuilt water system, a rewritten hiring policy, redrawn voting districts — whose value no settlement figure captures. Counsel in exit interviews ranked injunctive terms as the more durable half of their settlements. (Placeholder figures.)
“I signed up to speak for 6,000 drivers. I didn't know it would take five years. I'd do it again tomorrow.”
Marcus and his fellow warehouse drivers were misclassified as independent contractors and shorted on overtime for years. An Impact Fund grant paid the wage-and-hour statistician whose analysis survived three challenges. The settlement returned an average of $9,400 to each driver — and reclassified all of them.
Across all funded cases with a defined class, more than 4.1 million people stood to benefit. The distribution is deliberately lopsided: a handful of statewide civil rights classes account for most of the total, while the median funded case represented about 3,200 people — a workplace, a housing complex, a school district, a parish.
The grant was 2% of our litigation budget. It arrived at the moment the other 98% would have been wasted without it.”