Eva Shang recalls when, during the initial funding stage of their startup, an investor once called her and her cofounder, Christian Haigh, “tweens.”
That investor’s probably biting their tongue now. Since it made its splashy debut through the prestigious Y Combinator program in 2016 — shortly after Shang and Haigh had dropped out of Harvard — Legalist has raised two funds totalling $110M dedicated to litigation finance and grown into a force within the legal industry.
The current pandemic has only made things even busier.
Shang told Business Insider that there’s been a surge in demand for funding in the last several months, only adding to the growth it’s seen in the past four years.
“The coronavirus has definitely put strain on law firms,” Shang said. “Due to delays in courts, law firms are seeing some of their cases not pay off in the time that they would have expected. And they are also seeing their clients reluctant to divert money away from core operations and toward legal fees.”
The litigation finance startup’s investment strategy is simple: Legalist vets cases by assessing a lawsuit’s likelihood of success, and reaches out to the business involved with an offer to fund its case. If they win the lawsuit, Legalist recovers some portion of the money. If not, it doesn’t recover any money whatsoever.
Read the full article on the Business Insider.