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Key Takeaways from LFJ’s Special Digital Event “Litigation Finance: Investor Perspectives”

April 8, 2024

Key Takeaways from LFJ’s Special Digital Event “Litigation Finance: Investor Perspectives”

On Thursday April 4th, 2024, Litigation Finance Journal hosted a special digital event titled “Litigation Finance: Investor Perspectives.” The panel discussion featured Bobby Curtis (BC), Principal at Cloverlay, Cesar Bello (CB), Partner at Corbin Capital, and Zachary Krug (ZK), Managing Director at NorthWall Capital. The event was moderated by Ed Truant, Founder of Slingshot Capital. Below are some key takeaways from the event: If you were to pinpoint some factors that you pay particular attention to when analyzing managers & their track records, what would those be? BC: It’s a similar setup to any strategy that you’re looking at–you want to slice and dice a track record as much as possible, to try to get to the answer of what’s driving returns. Within litigation finance, that could be what sub-sectors are they focused on, is it intellectual property? Is it ex-US deals? What’s the sourcing been? How has deployment been historically relative to the capital they’re looking to raise now? It’s an industry that is starting to become data rich. You have publicly-listed companies that have some pretty interesting track record that’s available. I’m constantly consuming track record data and we’re building our internal database to be able to comp against. Within PE broadly, a lot of people are talking about DPI is the new IRR, and I think that’s particularly true in litigation finance. If I’m opening a new investment with a fund I’ve never partnered with before, my eyes are going to ‘how long have they been at it, and what’s the realization activity?’ There is also a qualitative aspect to this–has the team been together for a while, do they have a nice mix of legal acumen, investment and structuring acumen, what’s the overall firm look like? It’s a little bit art and science, but not too dissimilar from any track record analysis with alternative investment opportunities. Zach, you’ve got a bit more of a credit-focus. What are you looking for in your opportunities?  ZK: We want to understand where the realizations are coming from. So if I’m looking at a track record, I want to understand if these realizations are coming through settlements or late-stage trial events. From my perspective as an investor, I’d be more attracted to those late-stage settlements, even if the returns were a little bit lower than a track record that had several large trial wins. And I say that because when you’re looking at the types of cases that you’ll be investing in, you want to invest in cases that will resolve before trial and get away from that binary risk. You want cases that have good merit, make economic sense, and have alignment between claimant and law firm, and ultimately are settleable by defendants. That type of track record is much more replicable than if you have a few outsized trial wins. What are things that managers generally do particularly well in this asset class, and particularly poorly?  CB: I don’t want to paint with a broad brush here. With managers it can be idiosyncratic, but there can be structuring mistakes – not getting paid for extension risks, not putting in IRR provisions. Portfolio construction mistakes like not deploying enough and being undercommitted, which is a killer. Conversely, on the good side, we’ve seen a ton of activity around insurance, which seems to be a bigger part of the landscape. We also welcome risk management optionality with secondaries. Some folks are clearly skating to where the puck is going and doing more innovative things, so it really depends who you’re dealing with. But on the fundamental underwriting, you rarely see a consistent train wreck – it’s more on the other stuff where people get tripped up. How do you approach valuation of litigation finance portfolios? What I’m more specifically interested in is (i) do you rely on manager portfolio valuations, (ii) do you apply rules of thumb to determine valuations, (iii) do you focus your diligence efforts on a few meaningful cases or review & value the entire portfolio, and (iv) do you use third parties to assist in valuations?  CB: If you’re in a fund, you’re relying on the manager’s marks. What we do is not that – we own the assets directly or make co-investments. We see a lot of people approach this differently. Sometimes we have the same underlying exposure as partners and they’re marking it differently. Not to say that one party is rational and the other is not, it’s just hard to do. So this is one we struggle with. I don’t love mark-to-motion. I know there’s a tug toward trying to fair value things more, but as we’ve experienced in the venture space, you can put a lot of valuations in DPI, but I like to keep it at cost unless there is a material event. Check out the full 1-hour discussion here.

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Trucking Industry Backs Federal Liability Bill Amid Litigation Funding Concerns

A bicameral bill introduced in Congress would bar liability claims premised on vehicle safety standards stricter than those set by federal regulators, and has drawn support from a trucking and insurance coalition that counts third-party litigation funding among the pressures driving up its costs.

As reported by Transport Topics, the Uniform Vehicle Safety Standards Act was introduced on August 6 by Rep. Mike Flood of Nebraska, joined by Reps. David Rouzer, Jay Obernolte and Jake Ellzey, with a Senate companion from Sens. Deb Fischer and Cynthia Lummis. The measure would amend Title 49 of the U.S. Code to prohibit common law claims alleging that a vehicle should have met standards exceeding those established by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

"In recent years, we've seen a sharp rise in lawsuits awarding damages based on state standards instead of the federal safety standards trucking companies are already required to meet," Flood said. Alex Rosen of the American Trucking Associations argued that where NHTSA has determined a standard strikes the right balance, "that expert determination should carry greater weight than hindsight judgments."

The bill itself contains no litigation funding provisions. Funding enters through the coalition assembled behind it, which includes the American Property Casualty Insurance Association and the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies alongside nine trucking organizations and Werner Enterprises. Research from the American Transportation Research Institute cited in the piece identifies third-party litigation funding and staged accidents as evolving legal threats to carriers, and links excessive litigation to insurance premiums that have climbed 36% over eight years.

For funders, the significance is positional rather than legal. The trucking sector has become one of the more organized constituencies pressing for disclosure and restriction at the state level, and preemption bills of this kind widen the front without naming the industry directly.

Commercial

Conservative Columnist Argues Litigation Funding Limits Would Disarm the Right

A guest column published this week makes a right-of-center case against pending federal restrictions on third-party litigation funding, arguing that the measures would strip conservative activists and small business owners of the capital they need to litigate against better-resourced opponents.

Writing in The State Journal, Drew Johnson takes aim at the Protecting Our Courts From Foreign Manipulation Act, led by Rep. Ben Cline of Virginia, and at Senator Thom Tillis's proposal to impose a punitive tax on litigation funding proceeds. Johnson is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research and the 2026 Republican nominee for Nevada State Treasurer.

His central argument is that the bill's stated purpose, preventing foreign governments from bankrolling harassment suits, is already served by existing mechanisms including CFIUS review and judicial discretion, leaving the new disclosure requirements to do work their sponsors did not intend. Broad disclosure obligations, he contends, would deter funders from backing cases at all, and the resulting shortfall would fall hardest on plaintiffs without institutional balance sheets behind them.

Johnson illustrates the point with Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker who lost an estimated 40% of his income during years of litigation before prevailing at the Supreme Court with backing from Alliance Defending Freedom. Absent outside support, he writes, Phillips "could have easily been forced to surrender."

The column is notable less for its policy analysis than for its author. Litigation funding restrictions have advanced largely on Republican votes, and the industry's defenders have generally come from the plaintiffs' bar. Johnson's framing, that citizens facing wealthy opponents should not be forced to fight alone, is an attempt to contest that ground.

Commercial

Five Years On, Arizona’s ABS Data Shows No Systemic Ethical Breakdown, Article Argues

An article published in the Arizona State University Corporate and Business Law Journal argues that five years of operating data under Arizona's Alternative Business Structure framework has not produced the ethical failures its opponents predicted, and that the debate is moving from theoretical objections to observable outcomes.

Writing in the ASU Corporate and Business Law Journal, Alex Chucri traces the framework to August 2020, when Arizona became the first state to eliminate ABA Model Rule 5.4 and permit non-lawyer ownership of law firms, with the ABS regime taking effect on January 1, 2021 under Arizona Supreme Court order R-20-0034. The central claim is structural: the state did not remove oversight so much as replace blanket prohibition with licensing, compliance obligations and regulatory accountability. Non-lawyers may hold equity, share profits and participate in management, but only under Supreme Court supervision, with approved compliance counsel, reporting procedures and audit requirements.

The article marshals the program's numbers. Licenses grew from two approvals in 2020 to 15 in 2021 and 25 in each of 2022 and 2023, reaching approximately 150 licensed entities by March 2026, with 114 ABSs actively operating during 2024. No ethics complaints were filed against ABS entities in the program's first three years; the first arrived in 2024, when the State Bar initiated disciplinary action involving two ABS-affiliated attorneys. A preliminary analysis of 2024 disciplinary actions, which the author acknowledges is limited by incomplete ABS staffing data, suggests ABS-affiliated lawyers faced discipline at a rate well below the broader Arizona attorney population.

Readers should weigh the source. Chucri is founder and CEO of Pravati Capital and in 2024 founded 1787 Legal Group, the Scottsdale ABS the article offers as its case in point. The argument nonetheless lands at a moment when several states, Illinois among them this week, are moving in the opposite direction, and Arizona remains the only jurisdiction with a five-year record to argue from.