This week, we speak with Eva Shang, co-founder, general partner, and chief executive officer of Legalist, an institutional alternative asset management firm. She leads the company’s 35-person team of engineers, attorneys, and analysts, and is a member of the firm’s valuation and investment committees. Before co-founding Legalist at 20, Eva studied economics at Harvard College.
The firm began in a computer science class at Harvard, data scraping the Massachusetts state court record website. The intention was to pull the site info to see what they might be able to do with it. Shang and her co-founder, Christian Haigh, began doing legal analytics as a project. That led to a stint at Y-Combinator, where the general counsel warned them of problems in their model of selling data to lawyers. He urged them to look into litigation financing.
She explains how they managed through their first legal defeat, which made them question their model. But their litigation finance success rate is fairly high, and their returns have been solid. They also fund two other strategies, Debtor-in-Possession financing, and government accounts receivables financing.
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