Burford Capital has come a long way since our founding in 2009. We launched Burford with a $130 million IPO in October of that year. As we enter our 15th year in business, we’ve built a more than $7 billion portfolio of commercial litigation and arbitration assets.
We remain as focused now as we were at our launch on how the combination of our capital and unique expertise in valuing and managing litigation and arbitration risk can benefit our clients. In 2009, we were focused on helping businesses and law firms use legal finance to address the significant challenges they faced in the wake of the great recession. In our 15th year, we’re better positioned than ever to help our clients navigate the uncertainties of this moment.
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We help leading businesses solve perennial problems
Businesses including Fortune 500s routinely work with us to address business challenges. In 2023 it became known that a Fortune 100 food distributor utilized more than $140 million in capital from Burford to monetize a series of its antitrust claims. Below, we tell the story of how a Fortune 500 GC met a business challenge from the company’s CFO with a $325 million deal.
We help clients win
We have a 92% track record of funding winning cases—including a record-breaking $16 billion judgment in the YPF litigations that showcases how Burford, which began funding the case in 2015, goes the distance for our clients.
Best practices bring legal finance in line with what clients expect from trusted partners
In 2023, Burford worked in conjunction with the SEC to establish new industry-standard best practices for valuing legal finance investments—enhancing transparency that helps clients better understand our business.
Proprietary data fuels our decisions and helps clients prioritize
In the age of AI, when more clients are hungry for data that can help them prioritize and value their litigation portfolios, Burford has a unique data set we use to model litigation and arbitration and help our clients achieve better outcomes.
We have unmatched capacity to meet client needs
Burford wrote over half a billion dollars’ worth of checks on behalf of our clients, and made $1.2 billion in new commitments—the third year in a row new commitments exceeded a billion dollars. Clients know we have the capacity and expertise they need to finance their legal department and law firms.
We work with the world’s best law firms
Burford has the most widely recognized brand in the industry.1 And it’s no wonder—we work with leading firms around the world (with 94 of the AmLaw 100 and 92 of the Global 100 having sought our funding), litigation boutiques and top regional firms.
We founded this business to meet client needs and we’re delighted that the growth of our business reflects how much our solutions are valued by clients seeking to mitigate legal risk, manage budgets and reimagine their legal departments as profit centers.
We look forward to working with you.
Christopher Bogart & Jonathan Molot
The perception of the legal department as a cost center is shifting: 55% of businesses either have or intend to build a program to recover costs from their litigation and arbitration matters.2 That said, many businesses can do significantly more to extract value from these assets.
Law firms that invested in high value practice areas like litigation outperformed their peers last year,3 and there is every reason to believe that this trend will endure in a period of continued economic uncertainty. As always, law firms that are able to meet client needs—including meeting client expectations for risk-sharing—will benefit from sustained growth.
Below, we illustrate how Burford helped our business and law firm clients in 2023—and how we can meet their evolving needs in the future.
Arbitrations are increasing in Latin America, especially in sectors impacted by the nationalization of lithium projects, market volatility around oil, gas and liquefied natural gas prices, and the $1.7 trillion of investment in energy, mining and construction connected to the global industry transition.
With the inevitable rise in disputes relating to these issues, businesses are working with Burford to leverage legal finance, in particular monetization financing arrangements that advance capital against the future value of pending arbitration claims. This follows a larger trend of arbitration finance becoming part of the fabric of international commercial arbitration and investor-state arbitration: In 2023, GAR tracked over 200 funded arbitrations.5
While the entry point to using legal finance is almost always funding a single high value case, businesses that have experienced the benefits of financing often seek opportunities to extend its impact still further. One area of opportunity is the funding of affirmative recovery programs. More than half of legal and finance executives (55%) say their businesses either have an affirmative recovery program or intend to build one.4
As GCs and CFOs develop systematic programs for their affirmative litigation recoveries, legal finance from Burford is an important tool to manage their often substantial upfront costs. As a partner to businesses building such programs, Burford can help clients identify and prioritize high value claims as well as cover the costs of building and maintaining an affirmative recovery program.
For several years, a Fortune 500 company had devoted resources and an internal team to recovering damages through litigation, ultimately working with Burford to offset the costs for a group of claims in its portfolio. The deal was positively regarded not only inside the legal department but also won praise in the broader C-suite, especially from the company CFO.
When in 2023 the company faced a new capital need, the CFO contacted the legal department to see if the company’s high value litigation assets could be used to help craft a financing solution. The GC then approached Burford for financing through a monetization portfolio, using existing high value claims as collateral.
Burford provided a $325 million monetization facility to boost liquidity and augment the company's affirmative recovery efforts.
The deal, structured with more than $225 million upfront financing and a $100 million option, provided the company with financial flexibility and liquidity. Burford would only earn its return if there were successful resolutions within the portfolio, significantly de-risking the claims for the company.
With this deal, the legal department not only helped solve a liquidity need but also changed the dynamics between the GC and the CFO. What would typically be the CFO's problem became an opportunity for the GC to proactively deliver value to the business. This case highlights how legal departments can become value generators by implementing affirmative recovery programs and working with Burford to use affirmative claims from that program to enhance the company’s liquidity, improving the GCs standing with CFOs and benefiting their businesses.
Litigation is unpredictable, and GCs face the difficulty of budgeting for matters that can take years to resolve; meanwhile, CFOs cannot rely on the timing or certainty of cashflows tied to successful outcomes. Novel funding structures can help legal teams offset these challenges.
Burford sees growing interest from legal and finance leaders in portfolio-based financing, where multiple matters can be financed in a single capital facility to create predictability across the litigation budget. Additionally, we see significant appetite to accelerate or “monetize” a portion of one or multiple pending claims, judgments or awards, increasing certainty and (because finance is non-recourse) de-risking matters.
Cessna Finance Corporation, a global aviation finance company, had two outstanding and unenforced arbitration awards that arose when counterparties defaulted on aircraft leasing agreements. But despite their cumulative value of more than $100 million, the awards remained unpaid and with no immediate prospect of cash recoveries, as the judgment debtors were well-connected Emiratis with the majority of their assets in the UAE who refused to pay.
Faced with the prospect of spending years pursuing complex, high-cost and risky enforcement proceedings across multiple jurisdictions, CFC reached out to Burford. Burford solved this challenge with a hybrid “money now, money later” assignment deal that gave CFC immediate capital and transferred the cost, time and risk of the enforcement campaign to Burford while retaining for CFC a back-end interest to ensure a further significant payment in the event of a successful recovery.
Following the assignment, Burford took on total responsibility for the multi-jurisdictional enforcement, including appointing and managing lawyers and asset tracing and paying all enforcement costs. The Burford team updated CFC on developments while removing all costs any distraction from CFC’s core business. The complex enforcement strategy involved proceedings in New York, London and the UAE, and has so far resulted in debtors settling one of the two awards for $50 million.
We have the scale and availability of capital to serve as long-term partners with our clients
95% of senior in-house lawyers able to name any legal finance providers named Burford first or solely
We draw on 15 years’ worth of data to help in-house lawyers and CFOs maximize litigation value
94 AmLaw 100 and 92 Global 100 law firms have sought our capital for their clients or firms
With a $7.2 billion investment portfolio, we have the scale to meet any client need and are multiples larger than other funders
We draw on 15 years’ worth of data to help in-house lawyers and CFOs maximize litigation value
London
Michael Redman
London
Philipp Leibfried
1 Of those able to name a legal finance provider, almost 95% name Burford Capital first or exclusively. 2023 Litigation Economics Survey. Available at: https://www.burfordcapital.com/insights-news-events/insights-research/2023-research-gc-survey-on-legal-finance/.
2 2024 Litigation Economics Survey. Available at: https://www.burfordcapital.com/2024-research-litigation-economics-survey/.
3 2024 Citi Hildebrandt Client Advisory, December 6, 2023. Available at: https://www.privatebank.citibank.com/insights/citi-hildebrandt-client-advisory.
4 Ibid.
5 Global Arbitration Review (16th edition). Available at: https://globalarbitrationreview.com/survey/gar-100/2023.
6 Allianz Research, Global Insolvency Outlook 2023-25: From maul to ruck? October 18, 2023.
7 “Commercial Chapter 11 Filings Increase 72 Percent in Calendar Year 2023”, Epiq Global, January 3, 2024.
8 2023 Litigation Economics Survey.
9 2024 Citi Hildebrandt Client Advisory.
10 2023 Litigation Economics Survey.
11 2024 Litigation Economics Survey.
12 David Perla, “The current (and future) state of AI in legal finance”, New York Law Journal (February 22, 2024). Available at: https://www.burfordcapital.com/insights-news-events/insights-research/nylj-current-state-of-ai/.
