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JurisTrade Litigation Asset Marketplace Launches Phase 1 Rollout with over $70 Million in Litigation Funding Opportunities

By Harry Moran |
March 19, 2025

JurisTrade Litigation Asset Marketplace Launches Phase 1 Rollout with over $70 Million in Litigation Funding Opportunities

The JurisTrade Platform soft-launched last week with over $70 million in litigation funding opportunities in single cases, funding mass tort dockets and law firm refinancing.

The JurisTrade Litigation Asset Marketplace (“JurisTrade’) provides a transparent electronic platform which facilitates both primary funding opportunities in litigation finance, as well secondary sales of such interests.

The potential market for litigation finance ranges in the several $100s billions, of which only $30 billion is currently funded. JurisTrade is designed to unlock this large unmet demand through its liquid and transparent marketplace.

The litigation finance ecosystem has been clamoring for years for this type of market solution. Similarly to many other major asset classes, JurisTrade was built on a foundation of industry standardization, transparency and process streamlining, which eliminates uncertainty and, thus, attracts liquidity for litigation finance, a bona fide uncorrelated asset class.

Clients of JurisTrade include institutions, law firms, litigation finance funds, and family offices.

JurisTrade’s Phase I rollout includes nine diverse investment opportunities including a high-profile single case, a judgment monetization case, a law firm debt refinancing case, and several mass action-related cases. An OTC service desk is being offered to assist our clients in negotiating terms and structuring all manners of trades and vehicles, among other things. Other market features, technology, and analytics will be offered soon.

Typhon Capital Management, Larry Hite, and two notable family offices are sponsors of JurisTrade, and JurisTrade will be leveraging their collective expertise and experience. Typhon, in particular, provides trading operations on JurisTrade. Clients can use JurisTrade to directly engage in claims trading, such as bankruptcy and mass tort, then leverage Typhon to invest in or create custom passive funds holding any manner of litigation interests or loans, and actively managed funds, such as thematic claim trading, market making, or activist litigations. Typhon can also structure insurance wrappers around litigation-focused investments.

The senior management team of JurisTrade includes James Koutoulas as CEO, Kevin J.P. O’Hara as Chairman, Shawn Hartpence as Chief Commercial Officer, and Andrew Barroway and Larry Hite as strategic limited partners.

“Mr. Koutoulas is a seasoned hedge fund manager and attorney with a unique skillset encompassing derivatives-trading, complex bankruptcy and class action litigation, and software development making him the perfect CEO to bring the emerging asset class of litigation assets to a wider audience. He and I share similar philosophies on structuring vehicles with asymmetric, positively-skewed, and uncorrelated return profiles which will be much appreciated in the litigation investing world,” said Larry Hite, Founder of Hite Capital.

“Similarly, Mr. O’Hara’s previous C-suite roles at NYSE, CBOT, Archipelago and Gulf Finance House, and as an attorney at the SEC and his financial markets development in Eastern Europe, provide JurisTrade with one of the most accomplished exchange experts to steer our growth.”

“Larry Hite is a pioneer of two assets classes – commodity trading and litigation assets. Larry is an original ‘Market Wizard’ and we are humbled to have him as a founding partner and advisor to JurisTrade,” said James Koutoulas, CEO of JurisTrade.

Please sign up to view our initial inventory and be kept up to date at www.juristrade.com.

About Larry Hite:

Larry Hite is a legendary commodities trader and one of the founders of systematic trading. Mr. Hite founded Mint Capital, which was the largest CTA in the world by AUM in 1990. He has since been an active investor in litigation assets where he has invested in thousands of cases.

About Typhon Capital Management:

Typhon Capital Management, led by CEO James Koutoulas, is a multi-strategy hedge fund and platform specializing in tactical futures, quantitative, and cryptocurrency trading. Typhon creates custom portfolios and structured products for institutional investors and wealth management firms and is headquartered in Miami Beach. Mr. Koutoulas also was lead customer counsel in the MF Global bankruptcy, leading the recovery of all $6.7 billion in customer assets.

About Kevin J.P. O’Hara:

Kevin J. P. O’Hara has a decades-long career in business, law and regulation, entrepreneurship, technology, international, investing, and post-graduate teaching. Mr. O’Hara is an active angel investor with several successful exits, including sales to LinkedIn, PayPal, and IQVIA. He has a plethora of private and public company board and governance experience.

He was previously: (1) a C-suite member at CBOT, NYSE, Archipelago, and Gulf Finance House (Bahrain); (2) an attorney at the SEC, DOJ, and a major Chicago law firm (products liability and mass tort defense)(3) a law and business school lecturer at Northwestern University and Loyola University; and (4) an in-county financial and economic advisor in Eastern Europe in 1990s.

About Shawn Hartpence:

Shawn Hartpence has over a decade of experience advising law firms, litigation fund managers and institutional investors on capital formation and litigation investment. Areas of expertise include mass tort portfolio funding, secondary mass tort portfolio trading, single-case funding, portfolio funding, single-case monetization, and capital introduction for niche litigation strategies. Mr. Hartpence is a partner at Ocasio Mass Tort Law, a DC Law Firm and a Board Member of a cutting-edge AI Litigation assessment company.

About Andrew Barroway:

Andrew Barroway is a distinguished litigator and hedge fund manager with a proven track record of success in the investment world. He previously built Barroway, Topaz, Kessler, Meltzer, & Check, LLP, the second largest securities class action firm in the country, and helped lead the $3.2 billion settlement of Tyco Ltd. International. At Merion Investment Management, Mr. Barroway invented the appraisal rights arbitrage trade where he managed $1.2B in the near-riskless strategy, annualizing 13.25% net for 12 years. Mr. Barroway is a strategic limited partner in JurisTrade and the senior portfolio manager of our upcoming Cerus Litigation Fund.

About the author

Harry Moran

Harry Moran

Commercial

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Commercial Legal Innovation

LSC Showcases Access-to-Justice Tech at San Antonio ITC

By John Freund |

The Legal Services Corporation (LSC) brought the access-to-justice conversation squarely into the technology arena with its 26th annual Innovations in Technology Conference (ITC), held this week in San Antonio. Drawing nearly 750 registered attendees from across the legal, business, and technology communities, the conference highlighted how thoughtfully deployed technology can expand civil legal assistance for low-income Americans while maintaining ethical and practical guardrails.

Legal Services Corporation reports that this year’s ITC convened attorneys, legal technologists, court staff, pro bono leaders, academics, and students at the Grand Hyatt San Antonio River Walk for three days of programming focused on the future of legal services delivery. The conference featured 56 panels—16 streamed online and freely accessible—covering topics ranging from artificial intelligence and cybersecurity to court technology, data-driven decision-making, and pro bono innovation.

LSC President Ron Flagg framed the event as a collaborative effort to ensure technology serves people rather than replaces human judgment. Emphasizing that technology is “not the answer by itself,” Flagg underscored its role as a critical tool when grounded in the real needs of communities seeking civil legal help. The conference opened with a keynote from journalist and author David Pogue, setting the tone for candid discussions about both the promise and limitations of emerging technologies.

A notable evolution this year was the introduction of five structured programming tracks—AI beginner, AI advanced, IT operations, client intake, and self-help tools—allowing attendees to tailor their experience based on technical familiarity and organizational needs. The event concluded with hands-on workshops addressing cybersecurity incident response, improving AI accuracy and reliability, change management for staff resilience, and user experience evaluation in legal tech.

Beyond the conference itself, ITC reinforced LSC’s broader leadership in access-to-justice technology, including its Technology Initiative Grants, AI Peer Learning Lab, and its recent report, The Next Frontier: Harnessing Technology to Close the Justice Gap. Senior program officer Jane Ribadeneyra emphasized the dual focus on informed leadership decisions and practical tools that directly support frontline legal services staff handling matters like eviction, domestic violence, and disaster recovery.

For the litigation funding and legal finance community, ITC’s themes highlight a growing intersection between technology, access to justice, and capital deployment—raising questions about how funders may increasingly support tech-enabled legal service models alongside traditional case funding.

Commercial

Litigation Financiers Organize on Capitol Hill

By John Freund |

The litigation finance industry is mobilizing its defenses after nearly facing extinction through federal legislation last year. In response to Senator Thom Tillis's surprise attempt to impose a 41% tax on litigation finance profits, two attorneys have launched the American Civil Accountability Alliance—a lobbying group dedicated to fighting back against efforts to restrict third-party funding of lawsuits.

As reported in Bloomberg Law, co-founder Erick Robinson, a Houston patent lawyer, described the industry's collective shock when the Tillis measure came within striking distance of passing as part of a major tax and spending package. The proposal ultimately failed, but the close call exposed the $16 billion industry's vulnerability to legislative ambush tactics. Robinson noted that the measure appeared with only five weeks before the final vote, giving stakeholders little time to respond before the Senate parliamentarian ultimately removed it on procedural grounds.

The new alliance represents a shift toward grassroots advocacy, focusing on bringing forward voices of individuals and small parties whose cases would have been impossible without funding. Robinson emphasized that state-level legislation now poses the greater threat, as these bills receive less media scrutiny than federal proposals while establishing precedents that can spread rapidly across jurisdictions.

The group is still forming its board and hiring lobbyists, but its founders are clear about their mission: ensuring that litigation finance isn't quietly regulated out of existence through misleading rhetoric about foreign influence or frivolous litigation—claims Robinson dismisses as disconnected from how funders actually evaluate cases for investment.

Commercial

ISO’s ‘Litigation Funding Mutual Disclosure’ May Be Unenforceable

By John Freund |

The insurance industry has introduced a new policy condition entitled "Litigation Funding Mutual Disclosure" (ISO Form CG 99 11 01 26) that may be included in liability policies starting this month. The condition allows either party to demand mutual disclosure of third-party litigation funding agreements when disputes arise over whether a claim or suit is covered by the policy. However, the condition faces significant enforceability challenges that make it largely unworkable in practice.

As reported in Omni Bridgeway, the condition is unenforceable for several key reasons. First, when an insurer denies coverage and the policyholder commences coverage litigation, the denial likely relieves the policyholder of compliance with policy conditions. Courts typically hold that insurers must demonstrate actual and substantial prejudice from a policyholder's failure to perform a condition, which would be difficult to establish when coverage has already been denied.

Additionally, the condition's requirement for policyholders to disclose funding agreements would force them to breach confidentiality provisions in those agreements, amounting to intentional interference with contractual relations. The condition is also overly broad, extending to funding agreements between attorneys and funders where the insurer has no privity. Most problematically, the "mutual" disclosure requirement lacks true mutuality since insurers rarely use litigation funding except for subrogation claims, creating a one-sided obligation that borders on bad faith.

The condition appears designed to give insurers a litigation advantage by accessing policyholders' private financial information, despite overwhelming judicial precedent that litigation finance is rarely relevant to case claims and defenses. Policyholders should reject this provision during policy renewals whenever possible.