2023 London ILFA Conference: In-house lawyers see legal finance providers as partners
Businesses have choices in potential legal finance partners—and clients expect more than a purely transactional relationship with their law firms and their funders. Businesses see the opportunity in working with a strategic partner who can offer valuable advantages in the form of faster responses, more custom-fit economic structures and insights that add value to the process.
As the industry grows, legal finance companies are becoming more akin to financial service brands. It is increasingly evident that large companies are using legal finance at scale. That trend is set to continue—and will in turn accelerate a tendency toward bifurcation in the marketplace, in which large companies and law firms increasingly turn to large and established legal finance partners that have the scale and stature to provide service at the same level as those large companies’ other institutional-quality partners. Already, in-house lawyers are most likely to cite reputation and experience as the most important factors in choosing a legal finance partner.
About the panel
The panel included: Amaury de Bruijn, Associate Director Legal, Royal FrieslandCampina; Chris Campbell, Senior Litigation Counsel, Baker Hughes; Emma Carr, Partner and Co-Chair of ThinkHouse, Gowling WLG; Karl Hennessee, Senior VP, Head of Litigation, Investigations and Regulatory Affairs, Airbus; Paul Salazar, Principal Counsel, Siemens; and was moderated by Ellora Macpherson, Managing Director & Chief Investment Officer, Harbour.
