Litigation Finance Is Like Venture Capital—Burford’s Wild Week

Hello, and welcome back to the Big Law Business column on law firm strategy amid a changing legal marketplace, written by me, Roy Strom. Reach me with your thoughts here.

It was a wild week for Burford Capital. It’s not every day that a publicly traded company has to defend itself from accusations of being “arguably insolvent” due to “Enron-esque” accounting. (Burford says neither of those things are true.)

Then again, Burford has never been like most publicly traded companies. There are only a few other litigation funders whose shares are listed on a public exchange. And one ...