Benefits of financing antitrust claims

Liz Bigham: Burford has a lot of expertise in financing antitrust matters. Can you talk about how that expertise benefits our clients beyond just having their matters funded?

Charles Griffin: We have seen antitrust litigation be a place where both companies and law firms are seeing the benefits of legal finance and are increasingly turning to it as a tool in very expensive, complex cases. A lot of firms and companies may want to do that. They may want to pursue these high value claims. Maybe a law firm wants to start taking cases on the plaintiff's side to generate additional revenue for the firm. Some of the counterparties we work with don't quite know how to do that because they haven't done it before. But we have; we've partnered with firms and companies for many years now doing precisely that.

We really see ourselves as a partner who can work with a company or a firm that's interested in pursuing these avenues and lend our expertise and provide a roadmap for how others have done this in the past and how it can be done most efficiently and effectively. Beyond that, if we invest in a matter, we really view ourselves as partners throughout the case. We obviously are not directly providing legal advice or legal counsel, but our team is made up of many former lawyers who practiced in this space or adjacent spaces. We see lots of these cases and we always view ourselves as providing a lot of value by being another set of eyes; somebody who can provide thoughts, feedback and advice on litigation strategy.

In addition, because we've seen so many of these cases, I think we have gotten a pretty good sense of what is a reasonable budget for things like discovery and experts. So, when firms and companies are trying to figure out how much this is going to cost, or how much should we be allocating towards this litigation in our budget, we can help figure that out and help sort of contain costs that otherwise could tend to spiral out of control. 

LB: Beyond benefits to a business' finances in utilizing legal finance, can you talk about the social utility of funding antitrust matters from the perspective of businesses as well as end-user consumers? 

CG: Some of these claims involve conduct that has a really significant effect on the economy in terms of raising prices for businesses and consumers, particularly in these times. Anything that has the effect of further increasing prices beyond the inflationary pressures we're already seeing is very harmful for businesses and consumers. So, one of the things that can deter conduct like that in the future is for businesses to know that if they do engage in such conduct, there will be a threat of litigation. That deterrent effect is aided by having legal finance available so that the claimants can level the playing field against defendants.