Litigation finance is a sector can fulfill one of the most important promises of alternative assets: non-correlation to the broader financial markets.
Eva Shang, CEO at Legalist, joins Andy Hagans to discuss the unique benefits of investing in litigation finance, and how her firm has found success in this niche.
Listen to the full episode on The Alternative Investment Podcast.
Eva Shang, 27, never envisioned a career in business. As a young adult, she enrolled at Harvard College and imagined a future as a civil rights lawyer. But she’d end up on a different path — leaving the university altogether to start her own hedge fund out of a garage at age 20.
Today, the hedge fund Shang co-founded with fellow Harvard undergraduate Christian Haigh is Legalist: An institutional alternative asset management firm using data-driven technology to invest in credit assets at scale, it boasts nearly $1 billion in assets.
Entrepreneur sat down with Shang to learn more about her journey building Legalist — and her best advice for other young women who want to break into the hedge-fund space.
Read the full article on Entrepreneur.
Eva Shang is the co-founder and CEO of Legalist, a hedge fund that specializes in technology-enabled alternative investments, including litigation finance and government contracts. Shang, now 27, founded the company after dropping out of Harvard in 2016 and has since grown her initial $10 million asset portfolio to over $800 million. Her fund is about to close on another $200 million, which will bring its assets to roughly $1 billion.
Read the full article on Yahoo Finance.
Eva Shang, she is the CEO of Legalist, which is an alternative credit fund or just firm. And doing some really cool things in the alternative investment space. So if you’ve listened to this podcast for a while, we love to just educate around alternative investing and, real estate’s a big part of that.
Read the full article and listen to the podcast on the Invest Like A Billionaire.
Legalist founder Eva Shang speaks to Andy Thomson about how her firm grew quite literally out of a garage.
Read the full article on PEI Private Credit.
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.
Eva Shang, CEO of Legalist, a tech-enabled litigation finance firm with 150 million dollars of assets under management. Legalist uses tech and sophisticated analytics to source and underwrite legal investments, mainly for small and medium size claims.
In this episode, Eva talks about her entrepreneurial background as a Harvard dropout, first-time founder, and now a leader in a fascinating niche in the legal industry. We discuss the nuts and bolts of how litigation funding works, its sticky ethical questions, and its implications.
Additionally, and in one of my favorite tangents so far on the podcasts, Eva I discuss how today’s lawyers in many ways resemble the grain millers of hundreds of years ago. To quote Eva: “In our current society, power has moved from those who process material goods, to those who process the contracts that govern them.”
If you like our discussion, rate us on Apple podcasts. Thanks for listening.
Listen to the full episode on The Modern Lawyer.
In 2017, litigator Curtis Smolar left a long career as a trial lawyer to become general counsel of Legalist, a litigation finance startup in San Francisco that uses algorithms to vet potential investments.
Read the full article on the Law.com.
A fledgling litigation-finance firm’s new chief financial officer once worked for one of its earliest investment backers. Legalist Inc., which focuses on backing small civil lawsuits, has hired Sean Liu as its new chief financial officer.
Read the full article on The Wall Street Journal.