A funder-versus-insider fight has erupted in Texas, where Siltstone Capital alleges its former general counsel Manmeet Walia secretly formed a rival vehicle and siphoned opportunities using Siltstone’s confidential materials. The complaint names a would-be investor, Hazoor Select LP, and a new venture, Signal Peak Partners, as pieces of the purported plan.

According to Bloomberg Law, Siltstone contends that Walia set up the competing effort while still employed, diverting deals and leveraging trade secrets. Details on damages and requested relief weren’t immediately available, but the fact pattern reads like a classic private-capital dust-up: restrictive covenants, fiduciary duties, and the hard-to-quantify value of a nascent pipeline in a niche asset class.

The case spotlights the growing institutionalization of litigation finance: the closer the industry looks to mainstream private credit or PE, the more it inherits their playbook of non-competes, IP enforcement, and investor-relations friction.

A decisive ruling could nudge funders toward more standardized employment covenants and trade-secret protocols—especially around deal pipelines and model IP—potentially raising operating costs but lowering leakage risk across the sector.

Burford Capital has taken a strategic step further into firm-side infrastructure, investing in Kindleworth—the operations partner behind a wave of high-performing specialist law firms—in a bid to accelerate launches and scale boutique platforms.

A press release in PR Newswire reports that Kindleworth has helped bring more than 50 firms and offices to market globally, supporting over 1,000 lawyers across strategy, compliance, finance, technology and BD/marketing. The investment is pitched as fuel for “next-generation” firms: elite, focused teams that prefer an outsourced, non-legal backbone to preserve partner time for client work. Recent Kindleworth-supported names include Three Crowns LLP, Northridge Law and Pallas Partners—case studies for how a fit-for-purpose MSO model can enable premium work without BigLaw overhead.

For Burford, the move underscores its foray into law-firm operations, where capital can unlock growth in tech, talent, and pricing innovation without touching the practice of law. It also dovetails with the industry’s growing interest in MSO structures that separate ownership of back-office functions from lawyer-owned entities, sidestepping non-lawyer ownership bans while still injecting outside capital into operations.

If early results show faster time-to-launch, healthier margins, and better cost control for boutiques, expect rivals to explore similar partnerships with legal-ops platforms—or to stand up their own. Open questions remain around governance: how information flows between an MSO partner and a funder, how conflicts are policed, and whether ethics regulators will ask for clearer guardrails as more deals close.