Highlights from Burford Capital’s 2023 Research Reports
A post from Burford Capital’s chief marketing officer, Liz Bigham, looks back at the trio of research reports that the funder commissioned in 2023, picking out the key insights uncovered from the surveys. In all three reports, Burford surveyed GCs and senior in-house counsel, looking at their attitudes, priorities, and concerns across commercial litigation and arbitration. In the litigation economics survey, Burford found that 74% of the in-house lawyers surveyed expected ‘an increase in the volume of disputes over the next two years because of the current geopolitical, economic and regulatory environment.’ In the face of the increasing financial burden from these disputes, 62% of respondents expressed their desire for ‘law firms to offer more creative pricing solutions, such as alternative fees.’ Burford’s commercial dispute & enforcement economics survey switched focus to examine how these legal teams were ‘optimizing the value of pending claims, judgments and unenforced awards without adding cost to their legal budgets.’ Judgement enforcement and collection proved to be a major pain point for these lawyers, with 2% of those surveyed reporting that ‘they recovered 100% of the value of their judgments and awards over the last five years.’ Encouragingly for litigation funders, when in-house counsel were asked what they were looking for in outside law firms, 69% included ‘familiarity with legal finance’ as a key attribute. Finally, Burford’s survey on ‘the commercial disputes leadership diversity gap’ explored the work that in-house lawyers are doing to improve diversity in the profession. The results showed an interesting gap between expectations and formal guidelines around diversity, with only 44% of respondents confirming that ‘they apply formal requirements for diversity to the law firm teams that represent them in court.’ In terms of making progress on this issue, 76% said ‘they would benefit from being exposed to recommended female and racially diverse litigation and arbitration lawyers from a trusted source.’