If you haven’t heard much about litigation finance, that may change soon. The practice dates back decades, though it’s been picking up momentum since 2006, when Credit Suisse Securities founded a litigation risk strategies unit that it later spun off.
What is litigation finance? In a nutshell, the idea is to fund plaintiffs and law firms in cases where it looks like there will be a winning ruling. When everything goes the right way, the capital that helps fund the lawsuits is returned — and then some — in return for the risk taken. Litigation finance firms — and there’s a growing number of them — basically want to estimate as accurately as possible the risk involved so they can bet on the right horses.
Interestingly, one of the newest entrants onto the scene wasn’t founded by career attorneys or spun out of a hedge fund or private equity group. Instead it’s a young, 11-person company called Legalist that’s run by a 23-year-old Harvard dropout named Eva Shang, who co-founded the company with her college classmate Christian Haigh, who also dropped out.
As interestingly, the pair, who say they honed the idea as part of a Y Combinator batch in 2016, just secured $100 million to put it to work. That’s roughly 10 times the $10.2 million they raised for a first fund that tested out their ability to find and finance civil lawsuits that pay.
We talked with Shang late last week to learn more about the new fund, which was raised from nonprofit endowments, family offices and institutional investors (including an insurance company) and that’s styled like a private-equity fund with a traditional management fee and carry structure.
Read the full article on the Tech Crunch.