Esteemed friend,
"...venture capital corporations have many charter requirements and guidelines for allocation, and I'm betting all of them require that the target company's claims, intellectual property, real estate, etc. must be free of liens, that litigious actions must be settled, et al."
Respectfully, I have to disagree. Please see my previous posting. The only exception would be in the case of a company with a single asset, and where the nature of the litigation clouds title, as it ultimately did in this case via the lis pendes, though LBSR has/had the counterbalancing effect of advancing toward drilling in Arizona.
These days, no company worth anything is ever entirely free of court-related issues.