On today’s Legally Speaking Podcast, I’m delighted to be joined by Christopher Bogart and David Perla.

Chris is the CEO, Director and Co-Founder of Burford Capital. Under his leadership, Burford Capital has become the leading global provider of legal finance with a group-wide portfolio of nearly 7.4 billion and a force in the global market.

David is Vice Chair at Burford Capital and oversees marketing, public policy, industry affairs and public relations. An entrepreneur and legal industry leader, David was named a Top 50 Innovator of the Last 50 Years by The American Lawyer.

So why should you be listening in? 

You can hear Rob, Chris & David discussing:

– Leadership at the Forefront of Legal Finance 

– Diverse Career Journeys Providing Experience as Fuel

– Dynamic, Strategic Roles on a Day-to-Day Basis

– A Passion for Innovation and Industry Leadership

– Key Skills Transferred to Client Success

Connect with Chris here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-bogart-b3114411

Connect with David here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidperla

Transcript

00:00

On today’s Legally Speaking podcast, I’m delighted to be joined by Chris Bogart and David Perla.

00:05

Chris is the CEO, director and co-founder of Burford Capital.

00:09

Under his leadership, Burford Capital has become the leading global provider of legal finance with a group-wide portfolio of nearly seven and a half billion dollars and a force in the global market.

00:20

David is the vice chair at Burford Capital and oversees marketing, public policy, industry affairs and public relations.

00:27

An entrepreneur and legal industry leader,David was named a top 50 innovator of the last 50 years by the American Lawyer.

00:34

So a very big warm welcome to the show, Chris and David.

00:38

Thanks, Rob.

00:39

Thanks, Rob.

00:40

Great to be here.

00:41

It’s an absolute pleasure to have you both on the show today.

00:44

But before we get into all the amazing work and experiences you’ve both had over the years, we do have a customary icebreaker question here on the Legally Speaking podcast, which is on the scale of one to 10, 10 being very real, what would you rate the hitTV series Suits in terms of its reality of the law, if you’ve seen it.

01:04

Coming to you first, Chris.

01:06

So I haven’t seen it, but from what I understand, the rating should be something like a two.

01:13

Mostly because I gather everything happens, everything wraps up in the space of one single episode, which, you know, it would be lovely if law works like that, but it doesn’t.

01:24

I think that’s very fair, but before saying more, I’ll come to you, David, for your response.

01:29

So I’ll give it a three.

01:31

And here’s why I’ll just add one extra.

01:33

So three reasons it gets to three.

01:36

Number one, they are zealous advocates for their clients.

01:40

So they get one point for that.

01:42

Number two, the way the associates and partners interact and play off each other is somewhat realistic, if caustic.

01:49

But the third, the reason they get a three is there is no shortage of colorful characters in great law firms around the world, and Suits gets that part right.

02:00

So they get an extra point for the colorful characters.

02:02

The rest is tremendously entertaining fiction, as Chris said.

02:07

I think that’s one of the best detailed answers per point.

02:10

So I think you win that accolade, David.

02:14

But let’s get into it more seriously.

02:17

Chris, would you mind telling us a bit about your background and career journey and then David?

02:22

Sure.

02:23

You know, very briefly, I was a banker for a couple of years before law school.

02:28

I went to law school.

02:29

I had a pretty traditional early legal career.

02:32

I clerked for, I’m Canadian, and so I clerked for the Canadian court, the chief judge of the Ontario Appellate Court after law school.

02:43

And then I went and became an associate at one of the big New York firms, Cravath, Swain and Noor.

02:48

Where it became less typical after that is that I was fortunate at Cravath to have a really active litigation practice.

02:56

You know, unlike lots of big firm associate journeys, I got to do real on my feet,litigation from a very, very early stage.

03:06

And so I developed quite a trial practice.

03:10

And I had some big clients, even as an associate, one of which was Time Warner, the no longer giant entertainment firm, entertainment and media firm.

03:20

And they asked me just before I was gonna be a partner, they asked me instead to leave Cravath and come and be their general counsel.

03:27

So I did that.

03:28

That was an extraordinary opportunity at a young age.

03:31

I did that.

03:32

I then inside Time Warner pivoted after a while to a business job and ran the advanced technology business.

03:39

And then I branched it on my own and ran a technology media venture capital business.

03:45

The litigation finance thing that we do now came about sort of as an accident.

03:50

We can talk a little bit more about how that came to be, but I’ve been running Burford for the last 15 or 16 years.

03:58

Yeah, and what a phenomenal journey.

03:59

And thanks for sharing that.

04:02

And David, we’d love to come to you to learn more about your background.

04:05

Sure, so mine started off like Chris’s tradition.

04:09

I was a corporate lawyer at a large firm in New York City, but I also had a lot of emerging technology clients.

04:15

It was the 1990s, mid to late 1990s.

04:18

in what we call Internet 1.0, and I was then hired to go in-house at the parent company of Monster.com, which was a very fast-growing internet company, and ended up as their head of legal and business affairs, relocating from New York to Boston.

04:35

So that was 10 years.

04:36

As part of that journey, somewhat like Chris’s, you meet people along the way and they influence you.

04:42

I met a tremendous number of entrepreneurs whose companies we bought who encouraged me to start a company, to do something entrepreneurial.

04:50

And in ’04, together with my best friend from law school, we started a business in India to provide English language legal work for large companies like the legal departments we’d run.

05:02

And we grew that, ultimately selling it to Thomson Reuters, growing it to about 1,000 people before we left in 2012.

05:10

So that was an eight-year journey.

05:13

I thought I would be an entrepreneur and then was recruited to become president of Bloomberg Law, did that through the end of 2016.

05:21

again thought I would be an entrepreneur and then I got a call and was introduced to Chris.

05:25

We had lunch twice and that was 7 plus years ago and Chris persuaded me that I really wanted to be perfect, which I did.

05:35

Litigation, this was really my first stint since law school, really knee deep in litigation, which, you know, I think what we do is a terrific value and we think it’s innovative and entrepreneurial.

05:47

And that appealed to me.

05:49

But also I’d have the large company experience from Thomson Reuters and from Bloomberg.

05:53

So it was a nice fit.

05:55

Yeah, absolutely.

05:56

So was it the conversation or was it just a really nice lunch that sealed the deal?

06:02

It was both.

06:02

If you know Chris, it was the red wine, most likely.

06:06

Good stuff.

06:07

Well, let’s get into a sort of typical day.

06:10

Chris, coming back to you, what does your role involve and what does a typical day look like?

06:15

And then back to you, David, afterwards.

06:18

So I don’t have very many typical days because I have a great job.

06:22

And my job has several different components to it.

06:27

Burford, obviously, as the world’s biggest leading litigation finance firm, we spend a lot of our time looking at potential litigation finance investments, so really interesting legal cases.

06:41

and putting them through our diligence and underwriting process and ultimately making decisions about them.

06:46

And then once we invest in them, being involved in what happens to the cases as they go through the process.

06:52

And so I spend some of my time doing that, thinking about cases before we invest in them and being involved in big, significant litigation matters after we’ve invested in them, especially at sort of a strategic level.

07:05

So that’s the fun part of the litigation end of the job.

07:10

I also spend a fair bit of my time just running the business and also doing the public facing side of it.

07:16

So I spend a fair bit of my time meeting with investors, talking to potential investors and doing the other things that come with having a multi-billion dollar public company around you.

07:27

So, you know, on any given day or week, the mix of those things will be different, but those are the key components of it.

07:34

Yeah, no, super interesting.

07:36

And David, we’d love to come to you for what a typical day or no typical day perhaps from your side as well.

07:42

Like Chris, typical is different every day.

07:46

My role has progressed over the seven years at Burford, which is part of the joy of a place like Burford is if you were with us for any amount of time, your role will expand and change in interesting and fascinating ways.

08:01

So most recently, I became vice chair in the early fall, which my day job, as it were, is to oversee our public-facing activities.

08:13

So marketing, public relations, policy, and industry relations.

08:18

So it might involve a podcast, it might involve reviewing materials, or working on incredibly important global policy issues.

08:28

So like everyone at Burfa, the role is global in nature.

08:32

We’re all over the world.

08:34

But in different variations, you know, I worked on the front end of the business, underwriting, origination, working on the operation technology.

08:43

I spent a lot of time because of my background also working on things like innovation, artificial intelligence, things we might do as the industry and technology evolves.

08:53

Yeah, and evolves at a pace.

08:55

And one thing I’m getting loud and clear about and why I’m so excited for today is the passion I can hear from both yourself and Chris, what you do.

09:02

So I guess, Chris, coming back to you, what motivates you in the work that you do?

09:07

Well, this is just for me, the best combination of the things that I’ve done in the past, right?

09:12

I love law and litigation.

09:16

Although there are elements of litigation that I don’t particularly love, and I get not to do those in this job.

09:23

So I don’t need to do document production and deposition discovery and so on.

09:27

I get to do litigation strategy without having to pay the price of actually being in the trenches doing the cases.

09:34

So I get a great deal of enjoyment out of just being involved over and over and over again in a large number of really significant global pieces of litigation.

09:47

You know, I get to see it because law is so time intensive. If you’re the lead partner at a law firm working on a big case,you know, you’re only going to be able to do a few big cases at a time because they each take so much of your day.

10:04

Because I don’t have that work component, that discovery and fighting the trenches component, then I can do at any given time many more cases than a law firm partner can.

10:17

And that really, I find incredibly enjoyable.

10:20

And I also really enjoy the fact that we have developed and built this industry and talking about what we do in the industry to people around the world.

10:30

Yeah, and it’s incredible what you’ve achieved and will continue to do for sure.

10:34

But we’d like to come back to you, David, in terms of the motivation point, what really motivates you in the work that you’re doing?

10:40

Sure, I wanna start where Chris finished, which is,leading the industry. We’d be joking if we didn’t acknowledge it’s really fun to work for the market leader and to lead an industry.

10:52

It just is, and everyone at Burford loves that.

10:55

I think it’s a combination of the smartest people, at least for me, that I’ve ever worked with in an industry that’s very, very smart.

11:03

And really affecting change in the industry, we’ll talk a lot about innovation if you read what we write about the industry. It is an innovative industry, we’re an innovative company, we are part of an industry and lead that of people who want to innovate.

11:22

And for those of us who came out of my background, not everyone at Burford is a litigator, not everyone at Burford is a lawyer.

11:28

The combination of finance, math and real business acumen that you have to have and you have to develop and sharpen those skills, I think makes for just a really interesting work day every day.

11:43

Yeah, absolutely.

11:45

And I think just looking at some of the work that you have done and continue to do, it’s only going to get more and more exciting, particularly in this fast pace, particularly in the innovation spaces.

11:54

But Chris, once again back to earlier parts of the journey and maybe some of the skills you picked up along the way, because you obviously spent 15 years innovating within legal as a litigator at Cravath and then you obviously went on to GC of Time Warner, you’ve managed some of the largest legal functions in the world, played significant roles in major transaction investigation matters.

12:14

I could go on and on.

12:15

But what skills did you learn during your previous roles that are now valuable in your current role as the CEO of Bertha Capital?

12:23

I think it’s really the combination.

12:25

It’s, you know, core litigation skills to begin with, because, you know, as in any investment area, you really have to understand deeply what you’re investing in.

12:37

And without being able to do that, I think you make substandard investments.

12:41

So you start with very strong litigation.

12:45

But then, you know, I build on that by the fact that I’ve spent real time at public companies that would set me up to be able to run this big public company.

12:55

And also just a series of core business and finance skills that aren’t necessarily part of the daily, you know, garden variety activities of a traditional litigation lawyer.

13:09

Yeah, it’s incredible how you kind of also have an entrepreneurial flair.

13:14

I think obviously you understand everything, but everything you’ve done and obviously what you continue to build with Berthoud, I’m getting a real sort of sense of entrepreneurship coming through as well.

13:22

I want to go back to you, David, because you’ve obviously served as president of Bloomberg, BNA Legal Division, Bloomberg Law, co-founded, and you know, various, I think it was a global legal process outsourcing provider, been very, very, very successful.

13:35

So same question to you.

13:36

What skills have you learned early on that have been super helpful for you as your current role as vice chair?

13:42

Sure.

13:42

I think, and this really applies to any industry, if you want to be very successful at what you do and you want to be the market leader, for me at least, it’s been a few things.

13:52

Number one, you have to constantly embrace learning.

13:56

and approach each day with an attitude of I don’t know everything, and there’s something new I’m going to learn today, tomorrow.

14:06

And very often, the entire day is spent racking my brain about a particular issue.

14:12

And by the way, teaching people, taking experience in this, my case, 30 years of experience and working with people to impart that, but to also learn even from younger people, I think the other broad lesson, you know, I’ve learned is you do need mentors along the way and you do need people to look to who have done something successful and something differently that you can apply in your business.

14:39

So I was very fortunate, and Chris and I have talked about his mentors and my mentors.

14:44

I was very fortunate along the way to have them find me and to kind of embrace me.

14:51

And even today, there are people I will call, I’m struggling through the initial, I’m struggling through a way to develop something.

14:58

They’re not always older, by the way.

15:00

They’re not always more experienced.

15:01

They may be just in other industries, different approaches to sort of think through.

15:06

So I think that applies across the board to all these jobs and roles.

15:10

Yeah, you and Chris are talking my language for our loyal listeners that have been with me since day one.

15:15

I always talk about the importance of 360 mentorships and not just people above you, but to the side of you, beneath you, around you, and like you say, not necessarily sector specific as well, because you can take nuggets for wisdom.

15:25

From people of all sorts and also my mentor said to me very early on Rob before you learn you must earn so if you drop the L from learning obviously it spells earn and I think your continuous learning point, there is absolutely truth to that.

15:37

Look guys we spoke about all the good stuff, I want to be real as well and honest and authentic because getting to where you have and what you’ve built isn’t easy.

15:45

So coming back to you Chris, what are the hardest parts of your roles and what constitutes success both on a daily and yearly basis?

15:53

Can you share your thoughts and then coming back toWell, I think, and David will have insights into this as well, because he referred to the global policy challenges earlier.

16:03

You know, what we’ve been doing here is building the leading business in a new industry.

16:11

And that industry is disruptive.

16:14

I believe it’s disruptive in a very positive way.

16:19

but not everybody believes that.

16:21

And, you know, one of the things that we do, one of the things that legal finance, the litigation finance does is it levels the playing field.

16:30

Historically, there has been an advantage in litigation associated with repeat users of the legal system.

16:38

So in other words, big corporate defendants have tended to have a disproportionate success rate in litigation, in part because they’re repeat players, in part because they have a lot of money to spend.

16:51

And look, when I was a practicing litigator, part of my trial strategy was to outspend and exhaust the other side of a case in the hope of driving a litigation resolution, a settlement that was effectively below the fair market value of the claim.

17:11

That was the goal.

17:13

And what we do is we basically eliminate that advantage.

17:19

We level the playing field so that cases should settle at their fair market value and not at a defendant discount.

17:26

That obviously makes corporate defendants unhappy who would prefer, you know, number one, not to be sued at all.

17:34

And number two, if they are going to be sued, they would prefer a playing field that is tilted in their favor.

17:38

And look, I obviously understand why they would prefer that.

17:42

but they’re very unhappy about losing that advantage.

17:45

And so as a result, we’ve faced, you know, really since the business began, we’ve faced a very substantial level of concerted existential style opposition to what we do.

17:58

It’s not that people try to, you know, trim the corners here.

18:03

It’s that we’ve got people who would be much happier if we didn’t exist at all.

18:08

And so that’s, I think, one of the challenges associated with what we do, because those people have a lot more money than we do and a lot more political power than we do.

18:17

And one of the reasons for David’s new role is to enable him to spend a lot of time on these complicated global public policy issues.

18:29

Yeah, and I guess that leads nicely back to you then, David, in terms of those challenges and hardest parts of the role, and I guess what success for you sort of daily and yearly looks like?

18:40

Sure, success is easy.

18:41

I think as a public company, we can measure things fairly objectively.

18:47

How’s the company doing?

18:48

Is it growing?

18:49

What do our numbers look like?

18:50

What does the stock price look like?

18:52

And there’s alignment across the board.

18:53

I think we’re aligned as a leadership team, Chris and I and our fellow leadership team members, I think our investor group is aligned on that.

19:03

I think in terms of the challenges, to follow what Chris said on the policy side, one of the larger challenges, and one of the reasons I also oversee marketing and public relations because they’re so intertwined, is that the arguments that are being made by the people who would prefer that our industry doesn’t exist are laced with an incredibly high degree of disingenuousness.

19:28

And that is less true in a forum, in a judicial forum.

19:34

So when we litigate, we have to be very, very talented, but assuming there’s a neutral arbiter, you can usually engage in a fair fight.

19:44

And as Chris said, someone will spend more and there are all sorts of things people do to try and win, but at the end of the day, you can usually get a fair hearing.

19:55

In the policy realm,a lot of the arguments being made are either false or they’re disingenuous and they’re twisted.

20:04

And so we have to approach that and we have to approach what we say publicly, knowing that what we’re saying to a client can often be misconstrued or brought out by our opponents in ways that can be used to help them and not us.

20:22

And so we have to spend a lot of time in nuance in a way that in litigation is not nearly as complicated.

20:29

Yeah.

20:29

And again, thank you both for such sort of detailed thought out answers and giving a real overview of the challenges, but also the successes.

20:37

I want to move now to culture because you’re at the nexus of law and finance.

20:41

So how does your culture in the office compare to say traditional law firms or traditional finance firms, Chris?

20:49

So you’re right to put that on a spectrum.

20:54

And we sit on that spectrum, not at either end of it.

20:59

Candidly, we probably sit closer to the law end of the spectrum than we do to the finance end of the spectrum.

21:05

And it’s actually something that I spend some amount of my time trying to push us along the spectrum towards finance.

21:12

I don’t wanna go all the way there.

21:15

You know, I’m not interested in a, you know, in a hedge fund style, you know, yelling, screaming, throwing phones culture, but I’m also interested in taking core career litigators and turning them into financial investors so that they come with a lot of those financial dynamics that wouldn’t be part of the practice of law.

21:36

So we are on a journey along that spectrum today situated closer to the law end than the finance end.

21:44

Thank you.

21:44

And David, I think you would build on that in terms of culture and how that might compare to traditional law firms, finance firms.

21:51

Yeah, I think that’s right.

21:52

I think to give us maybe credit where it’s due, we’ve done a very nice job in being a little bit of both, but to our benefit.

22:02

SoYou know, there are elements of a law firm that, as Chris said, we’ve adopted, you know, the rigor of a law firm, the deliberative nature of what we do of a law firm, but we are not in any way, you know, the things people don’t like about a law firm are that, you know, partners control everything and you work for a million bosses if you’re at a law firm.

22:25

In some ways, the politics of a law firm just don’t exist at Burford, and we’ve taken cues from finance and importantly, being a public company, but we’re not bureaucratic because we’re sub 200 people.

22:40

So we’ve adopted a little bit of both.

22:44

I think culturally, if you think about kind of normative words, people would say, we’re clearly innovative.

22:51

It’s clearly a very smart company.

22:53

It’s a hard working company and it shares elements of finance and law.

23:00

It’s a little bit less structured than probably most of those because we’re growing so fast and because the people who come to us want to be at a growth company.

23:10

It’s got that feeling of not a startup, but definitely a growth company, an emerging company.

23:16

Yeah, and I think I referenced the book Good to Great in a few of our podcasts as well by Jim Collins, where it’s energy inputs into the flywheel, isn’t it?

23:25

So if you’re in that environment, the more inputs, the more things you can put, you can keep that momentum.

23:29

So like you say, not necessarily startup, but there is an element of pace because you’re obviously continuously moving in a direction.

23:35

So, you know, Chris, coming back to you, as a legal innovator, what do you consider your biggest achievement thus far in your career?

23:45

Well, I think it has to be the creation and growth of an institutional litigation finance market.

23:54

You know, we didn’t invent the concept.

23:58

Although I was doing this as a hobby, I was among the earliest people doing this, even before Burford.

24:05

But when we started Burford, what we were doing was we were taking something that was really sort of a ragtag hobbyist area, and we were institutionalizing it.

24:15

We were taking it to the capital markets.

24:18

We were making it into a, what was then a multi hundred million dollar and now a multi-billion dollar business.

24:25

And we were at the same time, sort of taking the industry with us.

24:30

And so, you know, sitting here today in 2025, looking backwards, you know, I think everybody at Burford can be very proud of what we’ve accomplished.

24:39

I don’t think that anyone would have believed, you know, 15 years ago that we would be, you know, 15 years ago we raised $130 million.

24:48

Today we have a seven and a half billion dollar portfolio, that’s about a 50 times growth rate.

24:53

I don’t think anyone at Burford 15 years ago believed that that higher level was where we would end up only 15 years later.

25:02

And congratulations.

25:03

And you know, my mentor said to me very early on, new level, new devil, right?

25:06

You keep going, new challenges as you rise.

25:09

So I’d love to come to you, David, as a legal innovator yourself as well.

25:14

What’s been your biggest achievement thus far in your career?

25:17

It’s a great question.

25:19

So I don’t think there’s been one.

25:20

I think for me, the pride in what I do mostly comes from the people that I think I’m able to impact.

25:28

So one of the reasons I came to Burford was the people, but the ability to work with them, to help them grow, to learn from them.

25:36

I don’t know if I ever shared this with Chris, actually.

25:39

I had known Burford from2010-ish, when I first met Aviva, who I ultimately, you know, became business partners with at Burford.

25:47

And I always thought, oh God, I’d love to work at Burford, but never thought, what’s the role?

25:52

I never…

25:53

could envision a role because I wasn’t a litigator.

25:55

So when the phone call came, I knew Burford.

25:57

It was eight years later.

26:00

I’d known the business.

26:01

So there’s a lot of pride in being able to contribute as the business grew to be part of it and to help sort of lead it into that next stage, sort of it was in the growth phase of that evolution.

26:13

And clearly the other leading and being part of leadership teams of great organizations is a real point of pride.

26:20

I love that.

26:21

And I love that you both obviously take a tremendous amount of pride in your work and we also take pride in giving exclusives.

26:26

So there you go, Chris, a bit of intel from David’s story that you may not have known.

26:30

But Chris, you touched on it there.

26:31

Obviously, you’re in your 15th year of business, you’ve just celebrated that.

26:35

And you’re often referred to as a company that’s continuously innovating within the business world of law.

26:40

So how will Burford Capital continue to innovate?

26:44

Where do you see the business as you look towards the future, as I mentioned, that new level, new devil?

26:51

Yeah, absolutely.

26:52

I think that what we’ve done historically is really a very traditional capital business.

26:59

You know, we’ve put money out the door, lots of it, but we put money out the door against the underlying value of litigation assets.

27:08

But what we haven’t really done is, you know, paid attention to the ecosystem around litigation, all of the other things beyond the legal fees that are necessary to go from the beginning to the end of a piece of litigation.

27:25

And so about six months ago,We started down the road of being more disciplined about putting capital to work, not just in that core segment, but in the ecosystem more broadly, so that we can be involved in all of the things in the world of law that go towards making law into the profitable activity that it is.

27:50

And so that’s really, I think, the next generation of Burford’s approach.

27:55

Yeah, and an exciting one.

27:57

And again, I remember someone said to me very early on, Rob, so many companies focus too much on the ROI, they don’t think enough about the COI, the cost of inaction, you know, not looking at the bigger picture and actually what that could mean.

28:08

I think that’s a great example in terms of what you’re thinking about and growing moving forwards.

28:12

David, you didn’t possibly think you’d be on a podcast and not talk about the buzzword of 2024 and 2025 AI, did you?

28:23

Ever hopeful.

28:26

So knowing that AI is advancing, you know, I don’t know what rate of knots you would describe it, but how is Burford Capital using AI to advance its work and how do you think AI might impact the legal industry as a whole?

28:40

Sure, and we are extremely bullish on artificial intelligence and maybe just for definitional purposes, I’ll use artificial intelligence to mean advanced technology and software inclusive and not just you know, classic AI, large language model, machine learning, you know, technology in general.

28:59

I think for us, it lets me maybe differentiate where it’s not going to help.

29:04

It’s not going to help win the complex high stakes litigation that we traditionally have financed.

29:13

We will help, and let’s put aside the new businesses that we’re getting into that Chris talked about.

29:19

We’re absolutely going to get into new areas around litigation that don’t involve finance.

29:24

Within the finance industry, it’s going to help us at the very front end of what we call the funnel or the top end of the funnel, look for areas where we can be helpful to a client, whether that’s a law firm or a corporation.

29:38

And it’s going to help us in the very early stages of what we need to know about the caseIt’s going to help us sift through the facts, the incredibly voluminous files that make up the facts, and it will help the law firms and the corporations we work with.

29:52

It will also help us with our own internal, what I’ll call crunching, our valuation data, our ability to look and compare an opportunity to past opportunities.

30:04

But at the end of the day, because we’re operating in a leadership position,the very complicated matters that we finance will still be won by great lawyers, and they’ll be won on the combination of the facts and law.

30:17

I think also the other thing that’s going to happen, and this has happened in every industry, if you look at Chris’s career, my career, is it’s going to evolve in ways that we can’t fully anticipate today.

30:29

So there are companies that are looking at fact patterns and determining whether those fact patterns, in fact, are violations of law.

30:40

And they can find fact patterns in ways that no human being ever could.

30:45

That’s an incredibly interesting development.

30:47

Where will that lead?

30:48

We’ll have to see.

30:49

And so, some people will say we’re in the, I don’t know, the second or third inning.

30:54

I might argue we’re really in the first inning, stealing the baseball analogy, it’s really early.

31:01

And AI is developing very, very quickly, but its applications are taking a little longer than people anticipated, at least within law, with applications in there.

31:10

Absolutely, and I agree.

31:11

And I’m sitting here, my late grandfather ran his own successful law firm over here in the United Kingdom, and I have visions of what that would look like in a very paper-driven, going to the strong room.

31:22

I remember going in as a young kid to the deeds room and all of that.

31:25

And we’ve had Shark Tank investors come onto the show, and they’ve talked a lot about, we had who talks a lot about the value pyramid in the age of AI, in essence where technology is not going to slow down, it’s only going to keep going at this rate.

31:39

And it doesn’t matter if you’re a doctor, lawyer, or service provider, when the technology comes in, you need to find a way to add value to your clients to ensure that you’re staying ahead of this kind of curve.

31:51

You’re seeing that at a very simple level with paralegals, client intaking, voice intaking, receptionist, etc.

31:56

And I think that’s relevant to every service provider.

31:59

And I heard something else this week that was superthought provoking is there’s such investment in AI but there’s no investment in PI and you need to take the personal, that people intelligence, you need to get your people on board, you need to educate them because you can fly all these shiny objects, put all these great pieces of technology in, if people don’t fully understand them or use it, you’re going to struggle.

32:17

Let’s come back to you, Chris, because youYou touched on it before and gave a phenomenal success story.

32:23

I think it was 130 million to seven and a half billion to where you are and congratulations.

32:29

But I want to talk more about sort of the offerings that have evolved perhaps since you’ve started Burford Capital.

32:34

Could you talk us through that journey a little bit more?

32:37

Sure, when Burford started, it was in response to a clear need in the market.

32:44

You had clients who didn’t want to be spending their business dollars on legal fees, right?

32:51

Businesses, especially like we started during the financial crisis,Businesses were liquidity constrained.

32:57

They wanted to put their capital to work in their businesses, to make products, to hire new employees, to grow their businesses.

33:05

They didn’t want to divert what was increasingly many millions of dollars into collateral activities like litigation.

33:14

Law firms on the other hand, had a profitable bill by the hour business model and didn’t wanna change that business model and were constrained to some extent from changing it because of their limited access to the capital markets.

33:27

And so what we did at the time was a very simple thing.

33:31

We just stood in between the client and the lawyer, we paid the legal fees on behalf of the client and we took a contingent recovery from the ultimate case.

33:40

So call that litigation finance 101.

33:43

That’s all we did when we started, was that simple thing.

33:47

And we did it entirely through the vehicle of law firms.

33:51

In other words, the cases all came to us because law firms had clients who wanted some sort of alternative arrangement, but it was the law firms coming to us for help.

34:02

What has happened over time, what we’ve innovated and developed is products that go beyond that.

34:09

We now do,Importantly, we now monetize the underlying value of legal claims in addition to just financing their fees.

34:16

So if you have a meaningful legal claim, we’ll give you cash today against its expected future value, not only to pay the legal fees, but also cash that you can go ahead and use in your business to grow.

34:29

So we’ve turned litigation into a financeable asset for a business instead of something that they generally were unhappy about.

34:39

We also do this in addition to just a case of the time, we do this across multi-case portfolios.

34:45

So we’ve had a number of business innovations and a number of business developments as time has passed, and they have really contributed to the overall growth.

34:54

We would not be at that seven and a half billion dollar number if we were still only doing that first product, putting out five, 6, 7, $10 million at a time, it would be physically impossible for us to do enough cases to get to those kinds of big numbers without doing the kind of product development and product innovation that we did.

35:15

Yeah, and it’s hugely exciting what you have been doing and will continue to do as you’ve sort of mentioned.

35:20

We’d like to come to you, David, on a similar part of that question, perhaps from your own perspective on the offering since you’ve been with Bertha Capital or anything you would share from your own personal journey and how that’s evolved.

35:33

I think I can just layer onto what Chris said in terms of product offering.

35:39

And if we think back to how we started, you know, our conversation today,We talked about law firms and banks.

35:47

One of the exciting things about the business is if you sit with finance people, so where I live, there are lawyers, there are doctors, there are bankers.

35:57

Talk to bankers.

35:58

they immediately understand our business and they immediately jump to what we think of as product innovation, product development.

36:05

So the minute you tell a banker, what they’ll say is, Oh, you guys are just valuing risk and figuring out ways to move the risk and monetize.

36:13

They’ll use terms that sound like that, that lawyers don’t tend to start with.

36:16

And I think what we’ve been able to do is to adapt our business around, frankly, what finance people do within finance, not quite the same way.

36:30

So we’re not quite a trading desk, as it were, when we’re not creating derivative products, but we’re looking and saying, well, how do we help a company?

36:39

How do we help someone who’s been harmed?

36:41

How do we help someone who just comes to us who says, I need capital in the way that any other finance company would, given that our expertise is law and legal assets.

36:52

And so it’s natural that we’re gonna evolve.

36:55

The other thing I would note is law evolves and expands.

37:00

Regulation gets more and more complex.

37:04

We’re in an incredibly disruptive period in the United States, actually, and in Europe right now.

37:11

Anytime that happens,there are disputes and there are new ways in which the law and the people in the legal industry and the legal business have to evolve.

37:22

And so our nimbleness is frankly allowing us to develop products around that change and disruption.

37:29

you have to learn to evolve as these things come along and absolutely to that.

37:37

And we had the Chief Product Officer of Clio who sponsored our show, obviously the world’s largest legal tech who had their recent series F and he said, when it comes to a product, you know, you’ve got to think about falling in love with the problem, not the solution.

37:49

And I think that was a really good thought provoking way of looking at it from a product perspective.

37:53

So many people looking at this end solution said, no, no, to get the product right, you’ve really got to fall in love with that agitated point of the problem to then really go deep along the service level.

38:02

And let’s go back to some success Chris, back to you because it’s pretty impressive what you have achieved at Burford Capital.

38:08

93% of concluded matters under Burford Capital’s portfolio have generated recoveries for clients.

38:15

So how have you gone about achieving this super high rate of success?

38:20

So it’s really what we were talking about earlier.

38:22

It’s the rigor of the investment process.

38:26

And I think the important message around this is that Burford is a specialty finance firm first that happens to specialize in law, as opposed to being a law firm that happens to dabble in finance.

38:39

And when you approach it from that perspective,you know, the goal obviously when you’re a steward of investor capital is to not lose investors their money and to make a return for them on the capital that we invest.

38:54

And so that means building the very best investment process that we possibly can, which involves a lot of rigor, involves a lot of human knowledge and experience, but as David was discussing earlier, it also involves a lot of quantitative activity, a lot of technology.

39:15

And so we’ve been able to not only start with a finance driven investment process where we’re trying to choose only the very best cases and not lose money, but we’ve been able over the years to hone the quality of that process through these other inputs.

39:35

So that today at Burford, we have a dozen or more people who have nothing to do with law or litigation, whose backgrounds are, you know, sort of PhDs in astrophysics sort of things, who work hand in glove with the dozens and dozens of litigators that we have on staff to come up with the best rounded analysis of a potential piece of litigation that we possibly can.

40:02

And as time goes on, we’ve also developed an extraordinary amount of proprietary data, and we use that data to better our investment process.

40:12

So we were able effectively to have a continuous improvement loop that drives that quality.

40:18

And we’ve been very fortunate in seeing those things come through in our results, where we have, as you said, quite a moderate loss rate for what is inherently quite a high risk activity.

40:30

Yeah, and it comes back to that sort of flywheel and the momentum perspective that we talked to.

40:36

I guess coming back to you to build on that, David, my late grandfather said to me, It’s very easy, Rob, to be successful.

40:41

It’s far harder to stay successful.

40:43

So how do you feel like responding to that in terms of ensuring that 93 only goes up, not down?

40:52

Yeah, although I might put a pin in that.

40:55

I’m not so sure it’s so easy to be successful.

40:57

It does take a lot of hard work to get there also.

41:01

But I’ll take the question as it comes, Rob.

41:05

I think clearly it’s right.

41:07

Once you have achieved a level of success,you know, any business class we teach you, you have at best 18 months until someone’s completely copied everything you do.

41:18

That’s your tail end, right, is 18 months and someone’s going to copy it and figure out how to do it.

41:24

And, you know, whatever you did is only going to last a little bit of time.

41:28

And so I think we, like other great businesses,spend a lot of time thinking about how we continue to create value.

41:39

Ultimately, we start there.

41:40

How do we create value for our clients, right?

41:43

How do we either help eliminate pain for them or how do we create gains for them, whether it’s balance sheet solutions,income statement solutions for them.

41:53

But also, in a lot of ways, as we develop these new products, and this plays into my role in market facing, how do we make sure the market’s educated?

42:02

So that 93% statistic is probably my favorite number at the company, because what it tells you is we are the single best sifting function for meritorious litigation.

42:18

As opposed to one of the arguments that opponents will make, which is that we’re ginning up frivolous litigation.

42:24

In fact, we are sifting out frivolous litigation.

42:27

If you want to know if litigation is exclusively meritorious, run it through Burford.

42:32

And if we’re interested in it, it is by definition meritorious.

42:37

And so we spend a lot of time thinking about that.

42:40

How do we continue to do that?

42:42

It’s not easy.

42:44

to figure out.

42:45

It’s not just the facts of the case, it’s not just the law.

42:47

There’s all sorts of other parameters and other variables that come into determining that that we spend a lot of time on.

42:55

And, you know, we use technology, we use people to figure that out.

42:59

And you’re obviously doing fantastic and here on the show we also like stats as well and congratulations on that 93% and we love kind of retaining and we’ll continue to retain hopefully our top 1% ranking and in my legal recruiting world we have a 99% people of lawyers placed and not leaving their roles because the hard part isn’t just attracting the talent, it’s making sure that they stay and they’re happy and they get that warm and fuzzy feeling and really buy into the culture and progress.

43:23

This has been a masterclass from both of you as I knew it was going to be so I’ll just share one quote that’s always stuck from one of my mentors and I would love to come to you, Chris, for your last piece of advice and then David.

43:34

My mentor said to me, Rob, the magic you’re looking for is in the work you’re avoiding.

43:38

That’s been the number one thing that’s helped me throughout my career.

43:41

We’re very used to being in the comfort zone, but that work we’re avoiding is where the magic is.

43:46

With that in mind, what advice do you think you’d wish you’d known earlier on in your career, Chris, that’s helped you in terms of achieving success to what you have today?

43:56

Well, I actually think that advice was pretty good that you got there.

44:01

And, you know, I think that there is, you know, too much temptation, you know, especially early in careers, and I certainly have mine as well.

44:12

where, you know, you’re just traveling down a road in a straight direction without looking around very much because your perception is, you know, that’s the way to do it, right?

44:26

You’re just following along and the person behind you, the person in front of you, and not really looking around and having that holistic approach and saying, So, you know, what am I really good at?

44:38

What am I missing over here?

44:40

Like, I certainly was very happy as a litigator, but it’s clear to me in retrospect that I am better as a multifunctional person.

44:55

throwing some business and some finance into the mix than I would be if I had just spent the last 35 years, you know, sitting at my desk, writing the next brief, you know, writing the next discovery letter, making the next, you know, court argument.

45:14

Not that that wouldn’t have been a fulfilling career, not that I wouldn’t necessarily have been good at that.

45:20

But I think it became clear over time to me that probably I was better suited to doing something other than just that.

45:28

Yeah, and thank God that you have discovered all your other talents and everything else you’ve done, or else this conversation wouldn’t even have happened today.

45:36

I’d love to come back to you, David, on the sort of advice you’d wish you’d known when starting out your career, anything you would say to that?

45:44

Yeah, I think I agree with Chris.

45:46

What you said really hits it.

45:47

And Chris and I have been fortunate to get a lot of good advice.

45:52

I think I probably would have wanted someone to tell me, do not think that what you’re great at is exclusively what you’re going to be great at.

46:02

So be open to, as you said, to learning, and be open to and ask for feedback, both on what I was doing that was working and what wasn’t working.

46:19

Because that’s good– feedback is a good way of figuring out where you might grow and what, frankly, you might do that’s working, where else you might apply it.

46:29

And so that combination of reading and learning and being open to feedback from other people, I think the earlier people incorporate that into their careers, the better.

46:40

Yeah, absolutely.

46:41

I’m a huge advocate for feedback.

46:43

And, you know, I think ultimately you have to accept that feedback is feedback.

46:47

You know, it’s not positive feedback, it’s negative feedback, it’s feedback.

46:50

And I think if you can condition yourself to accept that.

46:52

and not take things personally in the workplace, you’ll be fine.

46:55

I’ve really enjoyed having both yourself and Chris on the show today.

46:59

And if our listeners, which I’m sure they will, will want to know more about Burford Capital or indeed yourselves, where can they go?

47:04

Feel free to share any websites or social media handles you have.

47:08

Would you like to shout them out for us, Chris?

47:11

Sure, so Burford has its website at burfordcapital.com.

47:17

And, you know, we have a social media presence on all of the usual platforms, probably with LinkedIn being the most actively used.

47:26

So you can find us at Perfect Capital at LinkedIn, but also on a variety of other social platforms.

47:33

Fantastic.

47:34

Well, it just leaves me to say thank you both so much once again for your time today.

47:38

It’s been a real pleasure hosting you.

47:40

So from all of us on the Legally Speaking podcast sponsored by Clio, wishing you lots of continued success with Burford Capital and indeed your future pursuits.

47:47

But for now, over and out.