Celebrating 15 years of innovation: Burford's founders share their journey

Christopher Bogart: It's pretty remarkable to be sitting here 15 years after we started this business. I think back to the conditions at the time. It was 2009—the middle of the financial crisis. Nobody really knew what was going on with the global economy. Law firms in particular were feeling a great deal of strain from their clients who had finally reached the point of saying that they were fed up with the idea of high fees and fees paid in cash. Jon and I met at a RAND institute conference in 2009. We had both been dabbling in this sector and we decided to join forces to try to create the first truly institutional platform to provide capital both to global law firms and to corporate clients.

It was a small start. We raised $130 million for a single investment fund on the London stock exchange. We hung out a shingle and went to work. It was a pretty remarkable growth trajectory that happened after that but we were truly a startup. We had no employees. We had no physical facilities. All we had was a concept and we were lucky enough to be able to attract some of the world's leading investors, in particular people at Invesco and Fidelity to back the concept and put us into business.

Jon Molot: For me, the concept was what really motivated me. I wrote law review articles on the need for a financial solution to the potential imbalance between parties and litigation. I realized though that it didn't work without permanent capital. I had been trying to do it with small deals. As Chris said, we dabbled to turn law review article ideas into an actual business. Partnering with Chris, we were able to start deploying capital and to see how what I've written about in theory could actually work in practice.

CB: Looking back over the 15 years, we've really been characterized by two things fundamentally. One has been growth and one has been innovation. When you look at growth, we went from this one fund in the London Stock Exchange to being a global business. We now have a seven and a half or more billion-dollar portfolio of litigation assets gathered from around the world. We're listed on the New York Stock Exchange as well now. We have billions of dollars in private fund capital as well as our permanent public capital. We have about 175 people in more than 20 cities around the world. That’s been the growth part of it. The innovation part of it, we started with a pretty simple single product, which was paying the legal fees for what was often a smaller client to be able to embark on satisfactory complex litigation with what was often a larger adversary.

We fairly rapidly moved into understanding that there was a thirst out there by even very large players for corporate finance solutions, that it wasn't economically efficient for big companies to be using their own capital to be pursuing litigation and that it was more efficient for them to use our capital. In much the same way that lots of companies lease instead of buy their equipment, the business rapidly became a corporate finance provider across the legal industry to clients directly and to law firms of all shapes and sizes. That really has been the hallmark of what we've been able to do to serve any meritorious case of scale anywhere in the world.

JM: I think back on that growth—the pivotal moments of what we started. I was in Washington and Chris was in New York. We then added the London office and started growing it, added the Chicago office, added people throughout the US, the Americas and through Europe. It is the combination of that geographic expansion and bringing on people that were able to think about more complicated, larger deals to meet the needs of major legal departments of large companies. It was a big transition and it was very exciting to see this happen and to be part of it.

As the market developed, people thought this is something we should jump into as well. They haven't really survived or thrived in the way we have. When I think deeply about it, I think it's that we have our commitment to rigor and excellence. We're nimble and we can respond to what our clients want. But at the end of the day, having a partner who is looking at cases deeply and carefully just as they are, who's thinking about the finances, to make sure that a case has the resources to take it from start to finish that understands not just the legal aspects of a case, but also the financial aspects. That's invaluable.

We found that clients come back to us again and again. Clients that have started with another competitor have turned to us because of our excellence.

CB: What it's led to is a continuation of our ability to propagate the business. It’s an exciting moment for us because even now we have fantastic people joining us. You've seen just in the last few weeks, we announced a meaningful number of additional senior hires drawn from some of the world's leading companies and law firms. This is clearly an area that people think has a promising future. We are just scratching the surface of what this has to offer in this enormous legal industry.