Too often, legal departments are on their heels defending litigation and managing unwieldy litigation budgets. Legal departments can generate an ROI for their companies by engaging in affirmative litigation. But who has the budget for that?

At 20 years old, Eva Shang figured out how to turn litigation into investment returns and is now running a tech-enabled investment firm focused on litigation funding. Legalist, the company she co-founded with Christian Haigh at Y Combinator, now manages $1.5 billion in alternative investments in litigation funding, bankruptcy, and government receivables. In this episode, Eva, now the firm’s CEO, shares how litigation funding works, how Legalist’s “truffle sniffer” technology sources litigation cases for her team of in-house attorneys to underwrite and evaluate for investment. Eva shares insights on how to evaluate cases and “pick a winner”, how to get litigation counsel to set and stick to a budget, and how her team that a “win” will be collectable at the end of the day.

And as a bonus, Eva shares insights of what the CEO wants from their lawyers. Turns out, mitigating risk isn’t at the top of the list.

Read the full article and listen to the podcast on The Legal Department.

Eva Shang, the co-founder and CEO of Legalist, a tech enabled investment firm specialising in litigation assets, based out in San Francisco. Eva started the company after dropping out of Harvard at the age of nineteen and has since built Legalist into a notable player in the alternative credit space. At the time of this recording in October 2024, Legalist was in the process of raising for their fourth fund and their previous funds have shown a strong track record.

Legalist focuses on three key areas, litigation finance, government account receivable factoring, and debtor-in-possession credit lines and bankruptcy cases. It’s a niche corner of the market and a unique take on deep value investing. In this episode we discuss: what Legalist does and how investors should approach litigation finance as an asset class; the decision making choice behind Eva’s decision to leave Harvard and start her own business; the challenges of patent litigation and why it’s so different from commercial cases; and finally, how investors evaluate litigation finance, particularly for those who are unfamiliar with the American court system.

Listen to the full episode on Spotify.

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.

Read the full article and listen to the podcast here.

Barry Ritholtz speaks to Eva Shang, co-founder, general partner and chief executive officer of Legalist Inc., an institutional alternative asset management firm. She leads the company’s 35-person team of engineers, attorneys and analysts, and she is also a member of the firm’s valuation and investment committees and board of directors. Before co-founding Legalist at 20, Eva studied economics at Harvard College. 

Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts.

Eva Shang, co-founder and CEO of Legalist, which is an institutional alternative asset management firm using data-driven technology to invest in credit assets at scale. Eva is a Thiel Fellow and participated in Y Combinator.

Watch the podcast on The Meb Faber Show.

He manages ~$2.5 Billion and is building a Modern Wealth Management Platform Christian Haigh’s journey from a disciplined choir school student in Oxford to a leader managing billions in assets is nothing short of inspiring. In a recent interview, Christian shared his insights on…

Read the full article and listen to the podcast on Startup Fundraising.

Legalist raised its inaugural fund of $10.25 million in 2017 and its second fund of $100 million in 2019.Eva has been featured in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and other news outlets for her work on Legalist and access to justice. Along with her sister Melissa, Eva is the co-author of Mia Lee is Wheeling Through Middle School, a middle-grade novel starring a girl with a disability.

Listen to the full podcast on the Fintech Nexus.

In this conversation, we chat with Eva Shang – co-founder and CEO of Legalist. She is a Harvard drop-out, a Thiel Fellow, and was awarded Forbes 30 under 30 in 2018. After founding Legalist at…

Listen to The Podcast here.

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.