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Community Spotlight: Caroline Taylor, Founding Partner, Ignitis

By John Freund |
March 6, 2025

Community Spotlight: Caroline Taylor, Founding Partner, Ignitis

Caroline Taylor is a Founding Partner of Ignitis, an early-stage litigation funder focused on developing cases to assess viability and prepare them for full litigation. With over a decade of litigation experience, Caroline brings a unique blend of funding expertise and strategic legal insight, leveraging an extensive professional network to support cases from inception to resolution. Ignitis partners with claimants, foundations, corporate clients, lawyers, experts, funders, and other legal professionals to ensure that each case has what it needs to maximize its chance of success.

Before founding Ignitis, Caroline was a partner at a leading international collective redress firm. She played a key role in expanding the firm’s European operations, including opening offices across several countries, assembling and leading teams, and driving case development and management. Her work in securing litigation funding helped support the development of over 30 cases across Europe and the UK. Caroline’s ability to seamlessly integrate operations between U.S. and European offices proved instrumental in advancing initiatives on both sides of the Atlantic. Her deep understanding of collective redress procedures in multiple European jurisdictions, combined with her experience taking cases from concept to resolution, makes her well-suited for her role at Ignitis.

During her time in private practice, Caroline specialized in class actions, complex litigation, and personal injury cases, gaining firsthand experience of the impact corporate misconduct can have on individuals. This exposure sharpened her litigation skills and solidified her commitment to justice. Caroline also served in several leadership roles, including as a Board Member of the American Association for Justice, Chair of its Railroad Section, and as a Board and Executive Committee Member of the Tennessee Trial Lawyers Association. She has received numerous accolades, including recognition by The National Trial Lawyers, Best Lawyers in America, and Super Lawyers. Caroline is a frequent speaker at international legal conferences.

She is admitted to practice in Tennessee, Florida, and Kentucky state courts, as well as in numerous federal and appellate courts in the United States and England and Wales.

Company Name and Description: Ignitis AG is an early-stage funding company. Ignitis was founded to solve a critical challenge: parties often need initial capital to develop the case into something viable to attract larger litigation funders. Essentially, to secure funding, one must first invest capital. Drawing on decades of experience in litigation and institutional investment, we are uniquely positioned to provide the capital and expertise needed to kickstart cases and drive them toward resolution. We focus solely on early-stage funding, ensuring that quality cases get the financing they need to be successful while increasing access to justice.

Company Website: www.ignitisag.com

Year Founded: 2024

Headquarters: Zug, Switzerland

Area of Focus: We focus specifically on initial case development and early-stage funding. We put our money in at initial, risky stages, to develop the case and prepare it for full funding and filing. We not only inject capital, but we also provide expertise and advice along the way to ensure that the case has the greatest opportunity for success.

Member Quote: “Too many meritorious cases never make it to court, not because they lack merit, but because the injured parties lack the financial resources or the know-how to move forward. At Ignitis, we are committed to improving access to justice by investing in cases that other funders might overlook and offering the expertise needed for thorough case development—ensuring more individuals have their day in court.”

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John Freund

John Freund

Commercial

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Commercial

A Framework for Measuring Tech ROI in Litigation Finance

This article was contributed by Ankita Mehta, Founder, Lexity.ai - a platform that helps litigation funds automate deal execution and prove ROI.

How do litigation funders truly quantify the return on investment from adopting new technologies? It’s the defining question for any CEO, CTO or internal champion. The potential is compelling: for context, according to litigation funders using Lexity’s AI-powered workflows, ROI figures of up to 285% have been reported.

The challenge is that the cost of doing nothing is invisible. Manual processes, analyst burnout, and missed deals rarely appear on a balance sheet — but they quietly erode yield every quarter.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. This article introduces a pragmatic framework for quantifying the true value of adopting technology solutions, replacing ‘low-value’ manual tasks and processes with AI and freeing up human capital to focus on ‘high-value’ activities that drive bottom line results  .

A Pragmatic Framework for Measuring AI ROI

A proper ROI calculation goes beyond simple time savings. It captures two distinct categories:

  1. Direct Cost Savings – what you save
  2. Increased Value Generation – what you gain

The ‘Cost’ Side (What You Save)

This is the most straightforward calculation, focused on eliminating “grunt work” and mitigating errors.

Metric 1: Direct Time Savings — Eliminating Manual Bottlenecks 

Start by auditing a single, high-cost bottleneck. For many funds, this is the Preliminary Case Assessment, a process that often takes two to three days of an expert analyst's time.

The calculation here is straightforward. By multiplying the hours saved per case by the analyst's blended cost and the number of cases reviewed, a fund can reveal a significant hard-dollar saving each month.

Consider a fund reviewing 20 cases per month. If a 2-day manual assessment can be cut to 4 hours using an AI-powered workflow, the fund reallocates hundreds of analyst-hours every month. That time is now moved from low-value data entry to high-value judgment and risk analysis.

Metric 2: Cost of Inconsistent Risk — Reducing Subjectivity 

This metric is more complex but just as critical. How much time is spent fixing inconsistent or error-prone reviews? More importantly, what is the financial impact of a bad deal slipping through screening, or a good deal being rejected because of a rushed, subjective review?

Lexity’s workflows standardise evaluation criteria and accelerate document/data extraction, converting subjective evaluations into consistent, auditable outputs. This reduces rework costs and helps mitigate hidden costs of human error in portfolio selection.

The ‘Benefit’ Side (What You Gain)

This is where the true strategic upside lies. It’s not just about saving time—it’s about reinvesting that time into higher-value activities that grow the fund.

Metric 3: Increased Deal Capacity — Scaling Without Headcount Growth

What if your team could analyze more deals with the same staff? Time saved from automation becomes time reallocated to new higher value opportunities, dramatically increasing the value of human contributions.

One of the funds working with Lexity have reported a 2x to 3x increase in deal review capacity without a corresponding increase in overhead. 

Metric 4: Cost of Capital Drag — Reducing Duration Risk 

Every month a case extends beyond its expected closing, that capital is locked up. It is "dead" capital that could have been redeployed into new, IRR-generating opportunities.

By reducing evaluation bottlenecks and creating more accurate baseline timelines from inception, a disciplined workflow accelerates the entire pipeline. 

This figure can be quantified by considering the amount of capital locked up, the fund's cost of capital, and the length of the delay. This conceptual model turns a vague risk ("duration risk") into a hard number that a fund can actively manage and reduce.

An ROI Model Is Useless Without Adoption

Even the most elegant ROI model is meaningless if the team won't use the solution. This is how expensive technology becomes "shelf-ware."

Successful adoption is not about the technology; it's about the process. It starts by:

  1. Establish Clear Goals and Identify Key Stakeholders: Set measurable goals and a baseline. Identify stakeholders, especially the teams performing the manual tasks- they will be the first to validate efficiency gains.
  2. Targeting "Grunt Work," Not "Judgment": Ask “What repetitive task steals time from real analysis?” The goal is to augment your experts, not replace them.
  3. Starting with One Problem: Don't try to "implement AI." Solve one high-value bottleneck, like Preliminary Case Assessment. Prove the value, then expand. 
  4. Focusing on Process Fit: The right technology enhances your workflow; it doesn’t complicate it.

Conclusion: From Calculation to Confidence

A high ROI isn't a vague projection; it’s what happens when a disciplined process meets intelligent automation.

By starting to measure what truly matters—reallocated hours, deal capacity, and capital drag—fund managers can turn ROI from a spreadsheet abstraction into a tangible, strategic advantage.

By Ankita Mehta Founder, Lexity.ai — a platform that helps litigation funds automate deal execution and prove ROI.

Case Developments Commercial

Burford Capital’s $35 M Antitrust Funding Claim Deemed Unsecured

By John Freund |

In a recent ruling, Burford Capital suffered a significant setback when a U.S. bankruptcy court determined that its funding agreement was not secured status.

According to an article from JD Journal, Burford had backed antitrust claims brought by Harvest Sherwood, a food distributor that filed for bankruptcy in May 2025, via a 2022 financing agreement. The capital advance was tied to potential claims worth about US$1.1 billion in damages against meat‑industry defendants.

What mattered most for Burford’s recovery strategy was its effort to treat the agreement as a loan with first‑priority rights. The court, however, ruled the deal lacked essential elements required to create a lien, trust or other secured interest. Instead, the funding was classified as an unsecured claim, meaning Burford now joins the queue of general creditors rather than enjoying priority over secured lenders.

The decision carries major consequences. Unsecured claims typically face a much lower likelihood of full recovery, especially in estates loaded with secured debt. Here, key assets of the bankrupt estate consist of the antitrust actions themselves, and secured creditors such as JPM Chase continue to dominate the repayment waterfall. The ruling also casts a spotlight on how litigation‑funding agreements should be structured and negotiated when bankruptcy risk is present. Funders who assumed they could elevate their status via contractual design may now face greater caution and risk.

Commercial

Manolete Partners PLC Posts Flat H1 as UK Insolvency Funding Opportunity Grows

By John Freund |

The UK‑listed litigation funder Manolete Partners PLC has released its interim financial results for the half‑year ended 30 September 2025, revealing a stable but subdued performance amid an expanding insolvency funding opportunity.

According to the company announcement, total revenue fell to £12.7 million (down 12 % from £14.4 million a year earlier), while realised revenue slipped to £14.0 million (down 7 % from £15.0 million). Operating profit dropped sharply to £0.1 million, compared to £0.7 million in the prior period—though excluding fair value write‑downs tied to the company’s truck‑cartel portfolio, underlying profit stood at £2.0 million.

The business completed 146 cases during the period (up 7 % year‑on‑year) and signed 146 new case investments (up nearly 16 %). Live cases rose to 446 from 413 a year earlier, and the total estimated settlement value of new cases signed in the period was claimed to be 31 % ahead of the prior year. Cash receipts were flat at about £14.5 million, while net debt improved to £10.8 million (down from £11.9 million). The company’s cash balance nearly doubled to £1.1 million.

In its commentary, Manolete emphasises the buoyant UK insolvency backdrop — particularly the rise of Creditors’ Voluntary Liquidations and HMRC‑driven petitions — as a tailwind for growth. However, the board notes the first half was impacted by a lower‑than‑average settlement value and a “quiet summer”, though trading picked up in September and October. The firm remains confident of stronger average settlement values and a weighting of realised revenues toward the second half of the year.