Burford Capital and the Future of Legal Finance
Burford Capital’s 2020 legal finance report is teeming with useful information on the state of the industry and where litigation funding is headed. Featured are managing director Greg McPolin and CMO Liz Bingham. Some key highlights of the video below, with answers from Greg McPolin: Question: Most significant or surprising finding? “One, the notion that the pandemic that we’re dealing with globally right now and the corresponding economic contraption that we’ve all witnessed will sort of providing lasting changes…all of our respondents concluded that there are gonna be big changes that come, and those changes will be lasting. Among them are how lawyers think about litigation finance and funding matters and monetizing legal assets. The other is…the notion that they can access the value of these—what one respondent brilliantly called-- dormant legal assets…litigation and arbitration claims, judgments that are sitting on appeal, or awards that remain uncollected. These are dormant assets that corporations have not typically assigned value to and monetized in ways that are meaningful to them.” Question: Are you seeing a shift in how legal teams are using legal finance? “Absolutely we’re seeing a shift in how corporate legal departments are looking at litigation finance and legal finance. I think they’re finally understanding that litigation finance is just another flavor of corporate finance. We say that a lot at Burford and I think that notion is beginning to take hold. There are some corporate legal departments that are really harnessing that notion. And they’re doing it to do what we think of as two main things:
- Manage their money-out problems--the litigation budgets, the legal budgets, to assert their claims and defend themselves in litigation. They can do that by accessing our capital to fund their affirmative claims, and then on a portfolio basis to fund and finance the defense side claims.
- The second way corporations are looking at legal finance is to manage their money-in problems. I think corporate legal departments…are thinking about ways to be more creative in terms of budgets…if there’s a way to get closer to being budget neutral, that’s meaningful.”