Teleport a corporate partner from the 1970s into today’s big law firm and, but for the computers, the basic business model looks the same: A few rainmakers, an army of credentialed paperers (some portion of them regretting their life choices), and time billed in mind-numbingly small increments.
Chris Bogart wants to change that. His firm, Burford Capital, is the world’s largest litigation-finance shop, turning legal bills into investable assets. It also owns stakes in several legal-services businesses outside the US, where rules are looser and lawyers’ commercial instincts are, somewhat surprisingly, sharper than those inside America’s white-shoe firms.
He sees a future where law firms themselves are investable. Separating their back-office functions into separate companies is one option that’s already gaining traction. The other, more obvious oath, would be for law firms to take money from investors — or go public — though that would require either a bold first-mover, Bogart said, or a collective push to relax state laws that bar ownership by non-lawyers.
“So many partners look back on their careers and say, ‘look at all the value I’ve created. If I’d started a technology company, hell, I’d be rolling in money,’” Bogart said on Semafor’s Compound Interest show. “Today I’m leaving it to the next generation as a charitable act.”
Law firms today resemble investment banks in the 1980s — private partnerships driven, at least in a lip-servicey way, by a purity of purpose that they’d rather not sully with too much open commercial talk. But huge paydays coaxed them into the capital markets, as did the ability to fund their growth with other people’s money.
“We get calls from just about every managing partner out there talking to us about what’s going on in the market, but everybody is sort of waiting for somebody else to try to take the next step,” he said.
Bogart, a self-described “recovering” Big Law veteran, also talked about the financialization of legal claims, his firm’s $16 billion fight with the government of Argentina, why he hates the billable hour, and why he doesn’t think AI will kill it.