Legalist closed on its fourth and largest fund dedicated to litigation finance for $415 million. The fund will continue to focus on the low to mid-range cases that Legalist specializes in. It’s a bright spot in a difficult market for capital.

The announcement comes as the funder celebrates 10 years in the litigation finance space. Shang co-founded Legalist in 2016 after dropping out of Harvard and obtaining a $100,000 grant from Peter Thiel’s foundation.

“When we launched in litigation finance, we were very much a niche underdog, and I like to think that we have preserved that status over the years, even though we’ve grown and our strategy has grown as well,” she said.

Read the full article on the Bloomberg Law.

Legalist closed a $415 million fund dedicated to backing lawsuits, the tech-powered litigation funder said Tuesday.

California-based Legalist’s fourth and largest fund deepens its investment in commercial legal assets, continuing to focus on single cases and portfolios. The funder also nearly doubled its assets under management in the past year, now managing $2 billion across all of its strategies.

“When we launched in litigation finance, we were very much a niche underdog, and I like to think that we have preserved that status over the years, even though we’ve grown and our strategy has grown as well,” said Legalist co-founder and general partner Eva Shang.

The company, which has around 40 full-time employees and also operates a $500 million government receivables fund aimed at contractors, is celebrating 10 years in the litigation finance space. After dropping out of Harvard, Shang co-founded Legalist in 2016 with the help of a $100,000 grant from billionaire Peter Thiel’s foundation. She passed the bar exam following four years of an apprentice-style legal education—called “reading the law”—and is now also a licensed attorney.

Legalist specializes in funding low- to mid-range value cases ranging from $50,000 to $5 million in investment, which Shang says have fewer issues with lengthy case durations. Its prior fund was $300 million and had more than 250 positions in single and portfolio cases. The company’s book right now is nearly a 50/50 split between single cases and portfolios.

Read the full article on Bloomberg Law.

From the moment he became de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk seemed intent on carving up the federal bureaucracy like a Thanksgiving turkey. Thousands of federal employees were laid off, entire departments folded, and contracts worth billions of dollars were scrapped.

That mayhem created a lucrative opening for one startup.

In the first half of this year, Legalist, a San Francisco lender founded by one of tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s fellows, extended more than $100 million to dozens of government contractors scrambling for cash. Founder Eva Shang says that’s about twice what it deployed in the three years since launching its government business.

Read the full article on the Business Insider.

Legalist, a private capital lender based in San Francisco, told the Financial Times that its “government receivables” business had extended more than $100mn in financing to dozens of contractors since the start of 2025, more than doubling the strategy’s previous total book of business. The group is looking to raise $250mn from investors to extend more similar loans.

Read the full article in the Financial Times.

The popularity of alternative investments has surged in recent years, with everything from fine art to French wine to Neil Young’s musical catalog enticing investors seeking to diversify their holdings.

The commercial litigation financing industry is ready for a larger role among this diverse group as a growing share of corporate legal departments and large law firms leverage third-party dispute funders as a tool in their economic arsenals.

Money from these firms provide financial executives a way to help smooth cash flows and free capital for their core business. For in-house legal departments, the funds can bolster legal budgets and unlock value from an asset — a successful lawsuit — where collecting a judgment could be months or even years away.

Funders can also provide legal capital to litigate cases in which the company may not want to fund a lawsuit unilaterally, such as an intellectual property claim. Some financing agreements also allow companies to use funds, backed by the collateral of other, ongoing cases, to defend against lawsuits.

“I think there’s increasing pressure on in-house counsel to be more than a cost center, and even if not necessarily to be a profit center to be more commercially aligned with the rest of the company,” said Brian Rice, chief operating officer and general counsel at Legalist, an alternative asset investment firm that has deployed more than $500 million to fund litigation.

“From the people I speak to, I think that’s an opportunity that a lot of in-house counsel really relish.”

Read the full article on the Legal Dive.

San Francisco-based technology-driven hedge fund and alternative asset manager Legalist is circling U.S. government receivables with a novel alt-credit strategy that utilizes proprietary algorithms to mine data and unearth investment opportunities. The strategy, which has so far raised around $200 million from university endowments, foundations, and family offices, sees Legalist invest in short-duration credit assets….

Read the full article on The Alternatives Watch.

College dropout, hedge-fund CEO and sporadic blogger Eva Shang ’17 is interested in the idea of a diamond-shaped life. “In the latter half of our lives, our options and possibilities narrow in on themselves, but in the first half of your life — especially when you’re in middle school, high school, college, or your early 20s — the world is opening itself up to you.”

Shang arrived at the red-brick dormitories of Harvard Yard from the peaceful suburbs of Philadelphia. On campus, she founded the Harvard Organization for Prison Education and Reform and tutored at prisons across Massachusetts. Though she spent much of her time at Harvard advocating for prisoners’ rights, she was hesitant about pursuing this passion professionally.

To Shang, Harvard was the base of a forking path. She could work in the public sector and be forever “rabble-rousing on the outside,” or she could attend seminars at the Charles Hotel to schmooze with recruiters over free food and eventually sign to a high-paying job in the corporate world.

Read the full article on The Harvard Crimson.

Companies that seek profits by funding lawsuits are using AI to help find cases to invest in, even as skepticism lingers about the tool’s usefulness.

Legalist Inc. built an algorithm called “the truffle sniffer” to search for lawsuits by focusing on variables such as the court, judge and case type. The tool was essential for the alternative asset manager’s growth, with $901 million now under management after its 2016 founding.

“The AI is a really crucial part of sourcing,” said Eva Shang, Legalist’s chief executive officer. She co-founded the company with the help of a $100,000 grant from billionaire Peter Thiel’s foundation after dropping out of Harvard.

Whether companies use AI to decide which cases to fund, or simply for research, the tool is becoming increasingly common in the $13.5 billion litigation finance industry, in which investors fund lawsuits and take a portion of any successful awards.

Litigation funder Qanlex created software called Case Miner to screen, rank and compare cases in Latin America and Europe. Case Miner then automatically reaches out to potential clients deemed most attractive.

Born out of funding from the Harvard Innovation Lab in 2020, Qanlex is “more of a technology company than investment fund,” said co-founder Fernando Folgueiro.

During the pandemic, the founders realized that international courts were increasingly putting dockets online, creating an opportunity to fund cases in untapped markets. The company invests from $100,000 to $3 million per case, and it tends to favor breach of contract cases.

Case Miner has been so successful that company leaders at times have had to halt using the tool because they could not handle the amount of leads it created for them, said co-founder Yago Zavalia Gahan, who is also an engineer and programmer.

Read the full article on the Bloomberg Law.

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.