Litigation as an Asset Class
What happens when you stop treating litigation as a cost center—and start treating it like capital?
In this episode of New Law Order, Joel Cohen and John Morley sit down with Chris Bogart, co-founder and CEO of Burford Capital, to unpack how legal finance emerged—and what it reveals about the structural limits of the modern law firm.
Bogart traces the origins of litigation finance to his time as a litigator at Cravath, Swaine & Moore and later as General Counsel of Time Warner, where constant pressure from CFOs exposed a deeper problem: dollars spent on litigation don’t just reduce earnings—they reduce enterprise value by multiples. In that light, litigation finance is about preserving balance-sheet value.
The conversation reframes litigation as a financial asset—one that can be underwritten, modeled, and monetized—while also explaining why traditional law-firm partnerships struggle to do this themselves. Bogart lays out how annual partner distributions, high partner mobility, and prohibitions on outside capital make Big Law structurally ill-suited to finance long-dated risk. He also explains how medieval doctrines like champerty lost their force, clearing the way for institutional capital to enter the space.
Finally, Bogart pulls back the curtain—carefully—on how Burford evaluates cases, and why litigation finance increasingly functions as a tool for risk management rather than speculation.
In this conversation:
- Litigation as Capital Allocation: Why legal spend can destroy multiples of market value—and how funding changes the equation
- Why Law Firms Can’t Be Banks: Partner mobility, annual distributions, and the cash-flow problem baked into Big Law
- Underwriting a Lawsuit: How Burford evaluates merits, economics, and collectability—and why most cases don’t qualify
Guest: Chris Bogart is the CEO and co-founder of Burford Capital, the world’s largest litigation finance firm. A former partner at Cravath and former General Counsel of Time Warner, he pioneered legal finance and helped bring it into the mainstream of global capital markets.
For more conversations with the figures reshaping the legal business, subscribe to New Law Order. For a CLE-eligible version of this interview and more legal analysis, visit www.talksonlaw.com. For questions or comments, email newlaworder@talksonlaw.com
