Why Burford?

As the former General Counsel of a Fortune 50 company, I'm very aware of the challenges that businesses face in dealing with legal expense. Clients choose us in particular because we have a reputation as the market leader for three very good reasons: 

• We have scale and stature in the industry

• We have a very significant amount of experience and expertise in this business

• We have a fantastic team of people drawn from the world's leading law firms that work with our clients

Scale is really important in this business. It's not just about bragging rights. Burford is many times larger than the next largest legal finance provider, and we have a highly diversified portfolio of commercial legal assets worth more than $5 billion.

And what that does is a few things. It gives us the capital to finance transactions at the scale that our clients need. We can do small single cases, but we can also do multi hundred-million-dollar portfolios of legal assets. So, we cover the entire waterfront in a way that most people cannot in this business.

Because of that scale we also have a large and widely diversified portfolio, and the reason that's important is that it means that no single case is critical to us. That diversification means that we can absorb the risk of taking on complex litigation just the same way that an insurance company is effectively pooling risk across a wide range of possible outcomes. Our scale lets us do that in a way that's beneficial to clients.

Finally, we're listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the London Stock Exchange and we're the institutional quality finance provider with our own permanent capital. 

What we bring is a whole set of things that go beyond just providing the capital. For example, we have proprietary data about litigation that probably exceeds any other proprietary data set that's available today. That gives insight into things like settlement values, arbitrator predilections and a whole variety of other things that are simply not attainable in the public market.

But I think most importantly we act as a business partner to our clients. Again, we're not just providing the money, we're a member of the team and we're helping clients navigate complex litigation because that is literally all we do every day of the year. To be clear, litigation remains the clients. We're here as advisory members of the team.

More broadly, Burford is excited about the opportunities that still exist in legal finance. We're at a stage of the market where many companies are now taking advantage of the opportunities that legal finance provide. But many still are not. Today, pretty much everybody knows that this capital exists, but a lot of people still haven't figured out exactly how to go about using it, and we're here to help with that process.

We spend a lot of our time talking to corporate clients, talking to law firms, and working with them to solve their problems and that's what we're here to do.