>McDonald's spent several million pounds, while Steel and Morris spent £30,000; this disparity in funds meant Steel and Morris were not able to call all the witnesses they wanted, especially witnesses from South America who were intended to support their claims about McDonald's activities in that continent's rainforests.
It's pretty galling that the justice system, which is a public tool, being gamed in this way by a party with vastly greater assets. It's a bit tricky to see exactly how to fix this, since you don't really want to just give each side a court-appointed lawyer: you really should get to pick your own lawyer. But what to do about the fact that you might want to pick an expensive lawyer?
It seems to me that one compromise would be to recognize that you can legitimately have a strong interest in the case having a just outcome, and thus want to spend more money fighting it, while at the same time not allowing one side to outspend the other.
One way to achieve this would be requiring that each side can only pay into a common pool of money, which is then split equally between the defence and prosecution.
The practical difficulty in implementing this is that a large company (e.g. McDonalds) will have in-house counsel who are not just hired for solely this case, and it would be hard to dis-entangle just how much of their salary should be counted as being for this particular case.