Who wants to own big law? This guy.

Liz Hoffman:
Welcome to Compound Interest from Semafor Business, a show where we explore the seismic and subtle ways that business and finance are changing. I am Semafor’s business and finance editor, Liz Hoffman, joined as always by my colleague, Rohan. Actually, welcome back. You were off last week.

Rohan Goswami:
I was off. I was bumped for Marc Lore, which I was sad about, but it was a great episode.

Liz Hoffman:
We had a lot of fun, but we are back in-

Rohan Goswami:
All right, don’t rub it in.

Liz Hoffman:
... more comfortable territory for you and me, which is the financialization of everything. I started my career really as a reporter at a legal trade pub covering law firms. So I’ve always had a soft spot for the business of law, could never convince anyone was interesting for 15 years. And now it is super interesting.

Rohan Goswami:
It sure is very interesting. Yeah.

Liz Hoffman:
A bunch of reasons AI is just threatening. I think the baby lawyer reviewing contract documents all night is just the peak case for what people talk about when they say the knowledge economy jobs are under threat.

Rohan Goswami:
On a personal level, my mother, as any good Indian mother, has never stopped dragging me about not going to law school and just looking at and covering all the changes that are happening to 3Ls and first year associates and the way that none of them feel like they have their feet under them, I feel slightly vindicated, if not a little bad for my friends.

Liz Hoffman:
That’s not a comfy place to be. But the other thing we talk a lot on the show about is everything is cashflow now and that all kinds of risks are being spun up and molded into to fit some funding hole that is sitting inside the empires of Blackstone, Apollo, and KKR and all of those firms. I’ve just been watching for the better part of a decade now as it’s risen is litigation finance. And it is exactly what it sounds like. It is a way to finance lawsuits.
One of the biggest players in that is our guest today, Chris Bogart is the CEO of Burford Capital. He is a recovering lawyer, started his career at the whitest of white-shoe firms at Cravath, was in-house at Time Warner, has built this business that is starting to attract a lot of attention, a lot of copycats. When people say we are inventing new asset classes every day, this is what they’re talking about.

Rohan Goswami:
It’s funny, when we were preparing for this, I was reading his exit interview from 2000 from the GC role at Time Warner, back when there were trades beyond Law360 that covered law. And what he said was that for his next chapter, he wanted to combine law with business management. They’re trying to dip their toe into everything here. They have taken stakes in law firms, they’re financing litigation around the world.

Liz Hoffman:
We’ll get into this with Chris about there’s some reasons why it’s harder to do that in the US. But I imagine that in 10 years, Burford is a holding company for a bunch of law firms and law firm services and is a really interesting index fund of what we don’t often think of as an industry because it’s just so poorly run and weird. These are private partnerships. It’s starting to change a little bit, but very few of them have anyone whose business card says, “CEO”. These are not businesses run all that strategically, all that commercially. And I think it’d be fun to talk to him about all that.

Rohan Goswami:
Chris is waiting for us. So let’s pause there, take a quick break and we’ll be back with more.

Liz Hoffman:
Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Bogart:
Thanks very much. Nice to see you.

Liz Hoffman:
Let’s start with actually just explaining for our audience what is litigation finance and how does it work?

Chris Bogart:
So litigation finance is simply treating litigation claims as financial assets. When you think about what litigation is stepping back, it’s just an effort for the most part to get money to move from one party to another. And so it’s got all the characteristics of a normal financial asset. And so you can do with that financial asset the same thing that you can do with lots of other intangible financial assets like receivables. You can secure them, you can borrow against them, or in our case, you can provide non-recourse capital against them.

Liz Hoffman:
So if I’m a big company and I’m in some commercial dispute over some IP with one of my rivals, I’ve got something sitting on my balance sheet, which is maybe I’ll get some money in the future and you have turned that into an investible product, right?

Chris Bogart:
In fact, yes, but, and the but is that it’s not even sitting on your balance sheet. It’s invisible to investors because for an operating company, we don’t put a piece of litigation on the balance sheet. We usually just stick it in a footnote and say that it exists. And so you have effectively this invisible financial asset that has value that businesses are for the most part not capitalizing on, but there’s also a really important P&L component to this.

Liz Hoffman:
This is the money that general counsels are spending every quarter paying their lawyers.

Chris Bogart:
That’s exactly right. And when you think about that money, that’s something that investors generally speaking are not going to reward the company for doing a good job at. And so what you have today is a world of litigation where the general counsel is taking money away from the growth of the operating business, taking money that could be invested in growth and instead is diverting it to this collateral activity. And so what we do is come in and avoid the need for that diversion to happen.

Rohan Goswami:
Got it.

Liz Hoffman:
So where did this industry come from? What is the origin story? What is the case that convinced people that this was an asset class that was worth chasing?

Chris Bogart:
The origin story is the companies have always been frustrated with this problem. And as you said, I was once upon a time the global general counsel of Time Warner. So Time Warner at the time, big media company, no liquidity issues, lots of capital. But that didn’t change what I said earlier about the disinclination of a business to divert capital away from its movies and its music and give it to me, the lawyer, so that I could go and hire other lawyers with it to try to make some money in a collateral litigation claim.

Rohan Goswami:
You were a cost center.

Chris Bogart:
I was a cost center and it’s even worse than that because if I’m spending the money, that’s reducing corporate profits. EBITDA is going down, net profits are going down, Time Warner’s trading at a nice multiple. So I spend 10 million bucks on a piece of litigation, Time Warner’s trading at 20 times EBITDA. That all of a sudden is a $200 million hit to market value. The problem is when I go and spend that 10 million bucks and win 50 with it, investors on the market are not going to give me a 20 times multiple on the 50.

Rohan Goswami:
Right.

Chris Bogart:
And so I’m actually destroying shareholder value by spending my own cash to go and get a cash positive outcome in litigation. So that’s the problem that was always there. Now when you say, “Okay, well fine, that exists in lots of other places.” The normal reaction then is you go to your supplier, you go to the other side of the equation, in this case the law firm, and you say, “Look, your business model of charging me current cash by the hour doesn’t work for me. So change your business model.” But law firms can’t. Law firms don’t have access to external capital. As a regulatory matter, they don’t access the markets. There are no public law firms in the United States. There are no private equity owned law firms in the United States. With a footnote, we can come to later.

Liz Hoffman:
Yeah, we’re going to get into all that. I’m very excited to pick your brain on that.

Chris Bogart:
But for the most part, that’s not going on. And so you’ve got this dilemma where companies don’t want to be buying legal services in the way that they’re being sold, but law firms don’t really have another option. And so what that did is created a fertile ground for us to come in and sit in the middle of that relationship and give both parties what they want. Pay the law firms the cash that they need to make their business model work and at the same time provide corporates the cash solution so that they don’t have to divert operating funds to collateral activities.

Liz Hoffman:
Was there a particular case early on in the development of litigation finance that made everyone sit up straight?

Chris Bogart:
What it actually was was the financial crisis more than anything else. I had been doing this before the financial crisis effectively as a hobby. I was running a venture capital fund focused on tech media, but I spent a percent of my time doing this for a friend of mine who was a partner at Latham & Watkins, one of the big law firms. But I wasn’t trying to commercialize it. I was just doing it as a hobby fund. Other law firms knew I was doing that though and I would get requests from them to expand what I did and I wasn’t really interested in that until we got to the financial crisis.
And then two things happened at the same time. One was my day job, my tech media business, well, those valuations didn’t look all that attractive anymore. And at the same time, I had law firms going nuts looking for capital because their clients were all concerned about liquidity and were really clamping down on their willingness to pay for legal spending. And so that was basically an opportunity to go and try to professionalize this idea and turn it into something that is now today a global multi-billion dollar industry.

Liz Hoffman:
Can you talk a little bit about how you decide what’s a winner and what’s a loser and what you’re going to put your money behind?

Chris Bogart:
Sure. And we absolutely are doing that in the sense that we’re engaged in very substantial amount of upfront underwriting, even more than a traditional investment business is because there’s not really a viable secondary market for these things. And so once we start down the road with an investment, we tend to be holding that investment until maturity. We don’t get to re-underwrite it along the way and say, “Oh gee, we’re going to change our mind and go in a different direction.”
So a lot of what we’re doing because we’re not buying them and we’re not controlling them, a lot of what we’re doing is that upfront investing activity. And so we’re looking at a large pool just like a private equity firm does. We’re looking at a large pool of inbound potential opportunities and we’re sifting through them to try to find the ones that we think have the best combination of legal merits, quantifiable, supportable damages and collectibility. And those are really the three pillars that we look at when we do this.

Rohan Goswami:
Are there hard and fast characteristics? It seems like IPO underwriting, more like an art than a science here.

Chris Bogart:
Well, I think there are two important things. Three really. The first is obviously you’re looking for cases that you think are going to win if they go all the way to trial. That’s the table stakes. But then the other two things are you’re looking for real damages. So we don’t do this for airy fairy thoughts. “Gee, I should have, would have thought I was going to get this great outcome, but I don’t really have a good concrete proof of damages.” And we’re looking for flexibility. We’re looking to be sure that if we do go all the way through this piece of litigation and get to a positive result, that we can actually get our hands on the money as opposed to it being, for example, hidden in some Russian oligarch.

Rohan Goswami:
You’ve seen a lot of deals break up. You’ve seen both sides sue each other. It’s been predicated on antitrust. Do you guys work at all with... I’m thinking right now, the big case that I’m tracking is Albertsons, Kroger, right? There’s no downside at Kroger stock price. Is that somewhere where you would step in and say, “We’ll finance this for you, Albertsons. You focus on running your business. We’ll take this off your books”? Have you done any sort of merger breakup financing?

Chris Bogart:
Without going to specific cases, that’s exactly the kind of thing that corporates come to us for all the time. We work today, we’ve worked with, I think it’s 97% of the Am Law 100, so the 100 largest law firms out there along with the boutiques that have spun off with them. And so the cases that we’re doing are the kind of cases, frankly, that you are covering. We’re not a middle market business. We’re not doing the slip and fall. The guy in the office who’s changing the light bulb who falls off the ladder. We’re not doing those cases. We’re doing large dollar complex commercial litigation that costs a lot of money and it’s the fact that it costs a lot of money that motivates businesses to try to look for alternative arrangements.

Liz Hoffman:
Tell us the story of YPF, where this started, and then we’ll get into the ruling that came down against you guys a couple of weeks ago.

Chris Bogart:
Sure. So YPF is actually a remarkably straightforward example of the kinds of cases that I’ve just been describing. YPF is Argentina’s oil company. Argentina, under a different administration years ago, privatized YPF, IPO run on the New York Stock Exchange. To get that deal done because Argentina already had a, shall we say, somewhat checkered history of its reliability in the global financial market.

Liz Hoffman:
Occasionally falling back in love with nationalizing things.

Chris Bogart:
Occasionally.

Liz Hoffman:
Not paying their bills.

Rohan Goswami:
Because I was not aware there was an iconic fight involving a New York hedge fund-

Liz Hoffman:
A large warship.

Rohan Goswami:
... and armed standoff in Africa.

Chris Bogart:
So to get that IPO done, Argentina had to make a very specific promise as part of its IPO. And the promise was that if it ever gave into those nationalizing impulses, it would tender for all of the shares that it had sold in the IPO. It would take the company entirely private. And so it made that unconditional promise. There was even a table that sets out the way that you calculate the tender price. So it’s very clear. And it’s also clear that without having made that promise, the IPO would never have happened. Investors simply wouldn’t have bought the stock. Well, you can probably guess the rest.
Fast-forward to a different administration. YPF finds a big new, very valuable oil field and the Argentine government says, “Gee, we’d like to own that ourselves.” Off they go and they renationalized. They basically expropriate a majority of the shares of YPF, but they don’t follow through with the tender offer obligation. In fact, they completely renounce it. They say it was a bear trap and that only fools would believe that they would pay so much money out. And this is a completely financial calculus. These are sophisticated players.
They did a full analysis that’s public about what it would cost us if we had to tender today or what if we litigate instead, what’s the time value of money basically associated with that? And an important part of that is the interest rate arbitrage because Argentina was paying, of course, way, way into the double digits in terms of cost of debt, whereas the courts are only going to award single digit interest rates while the litigation goes on. And so there’s a very, very effective financial arbitrage going on here. So Argentina says, “No, we’re not going to pay.”
The result of that is that the second-largest holder of YPF shares. The largest holder was Repsol. That’s the shares that were expropriated. The second largest was this Spanish firm that went bankrupt because it had borrowed against the shares from a consortium of international banks. And so we were ultimately appointed by the Spanish bankruptcy court to provide capital and some management expertise as those shareholders went and pursued a US federal court action to enforce the tender offer obligations.
After the usual litigation delays and tactics and so on, you get all the way to the end of the road and the former chief judge of the Southern District of New York, which is the Manhattan Trial Court that has jurisdiction over New York Stock Exchange matters, goes through a fairly straightforward analysis and says, “Yes, there was a promise, it was breached. Here’s the formula for calculating the damages. They should have made the tender offer there didn’t, and here you go.” And so a couple of years ago entered judgment in the favor of the plaintiffs. So that was where we were until a month ago.

Liz Hoffman:
For $16 billion, right? For a lot of money.

Chris Bogart:
Yeah, for $16 billion. But the reason that number is so high, again, is because of the interest dynamic. The tender offer formula produces... It’s still a high number, but this is a large valuable company and we’re talking about a significant portion of its equity. So the tender offer formula gave a number of something like $8 billion of damages, which is significantly less than YPF’s market cap. It’s consistent with the share percentage that these shareholders own of the company. But then the fact that Argentina is a very dilatory litigant. So the litigation has been running since 2015. So 11 years in, the interest component, even at the lower US court rates, the interest component is another by then $8 billion.

Liz Hoffman:
Gotcha. So you have this big win and then you didn’t. The Second Circuit ruled against you a couple weeks ago. Explain their argument. And my understanding is that you do not think this is the end of the road.

Chris Bogart:
It’s not the end of the road in two ways and we’ll come onto that. But first, what did the Second Circuit do? Three judge panel of the Second Circuit, which is the federal appellate court that sits above the Southern District of New York. And so it also basically supervises securities actions New York Stock Exchange. And historically, this has been a court that has been very attentive to the posture of the US capital markets. It has been a pro-market, pro-shareholder court in terms of enforcing shareholder obligations like that.
Unfortunately, what happened here is that this particular panel and the judge who wrote the opinion, and it was a divided panel, there was a dissent. So two judges voted to overturn the judgment, one judge would have upheld the judgment. The judge who wrote the opinion was clearly affected by issues outside just the question of enforcing this capital markets promise. The very first sentence of his opinion opens with a commentary on how much this was going to cost Argentina. Ignoring the fact that Argentina has already made a lot of money out of this [inaudible 00:16:57]

Liz Hoffman:
Because they’ve been producing oil from that field this whole time?

Chris Bogart:
Exactly. And they’ve been having the benefit of owning these shares. So with that as a starting point, once you start reading that, this is probably not going to end well. And basically the bottom line was he declined to enforce the promise. And the language is pretty striking. He calls it a knowing and flagrant violation of the promises it made.

Rohan Goswami:
To be clear, Argentina’s expropriation of the shares was this knowing and flagrant violation.

Chris Bogart:
Well, not just the appropriation but the failure to tender. So we’re not fighting here about the expropriation. Argentina appropriated Repsol’s 51% of YPF.

Rohan Goswami:
And Repsol partially got paid for that, right? 5, 6 billion dollars.

Chris Bogart:
Repsol partially got paid. Repsol settled in. And to be clear, governments are entitled to appropriate things. If a government wants to put a highway through my house, doesn’t matter that I might not want that. The government’s free to come in and take my house as long as they pay me compensation for it.

Rohan Goswami:
Right.

Chris Bogart:
So Argentina and Repsol did what Argentina and Repsol were supposed to do. The problem here was that Argentina didn’t do for the rest of the shareholders what it had promised to do. And of course the share price collapsed when this all happened. The court said it’s a knowing and flagrant violation of the promises it made. It acknowledged that everybody agrees. Argentina agrees that it breached the promise. That’s not a disputed fact here. There are no facts in dispute in this case. And the court even went on and acknowledged that the IPO would never have occurred if these promises hadn’t been made.

Liz Hoffman:
Do you think there was pressure either indirectly or directly from the White House, just obviously very close to the Malay government?

Chris Bogart:
I don’t. I don’t think that at all. I think notwithstanding the turbulence of our politics, I think that the courts have remained an independent branch of government. So no, I don’t think that there’s any dynamic here where you’ve got people in the White House picking up the phone and talking to Second Circuit judges. But I do think that we have injected a lot of social policy and politics, frankly, into judicial decision making. And I don’t think these other considerations really have a place here.
It’s very important for the US capital markets to have reliance on the security of promises being made. Nobody debates that this promise was made. Nobody debates that it was intended to be enforced. And now we’ve got the principal court overseeing the New York Stock Exchange basically saying, “No, I’m not going to enforce the promise. I’m going to instead worry more about a larger social policy goal.” And I think that’s really a very dangerous slippery slope for the US to go down.

Liz Hoffman:
What is the social policy goal?

Chris Bogart:
It’s to not hurt the Argentine people. That was clearly the dynamic here and that was part of Argentina’s argument. It was like, “Yeah, we did this bad thing, but gee, it’s going to cost us a lot of money to fix it and that’s going to hurt our people and so you shouldn’t make us do that.” And it completely ignores the fact that there are all these other people out there, banks, pension funds, all the people where these things flow through the economy who were damaged by this to the tune of billions of dollars as well and they’re right now getting no compensation at all.

Rohan Goswami:
What is next for you? Do you take this to the Supreme Court? How are you thinking about that?

Chris Bogart:
So you’ll do two things at the same time. One is you’ll continue to seek review in the US courts. And so that means first you’ll try to ask for the entire Second Circuit instead of just a three-judge panel to rehear the case. That though, as a practical matter, happens very, very, very rarely. So statistically, it’s unlikely that that will happen. And then you can ask the Supreme Court to review it. And again, statistically your odds of that going well are poor, but we’ll give it a try and see what happens.
The other thing, of course, is that what the Second Circuit basically did is it set this case up for investment arbitration. So there’s this whole separate world out there of bilateral investment treaties between countries. There is certainly a treaty between the United States and Argentina. There’s a treaty between Spain and Argentina and those treaties allow damaged investors to bring arbitration claims outside of the national courts.
And so here that claim will probably be brought before the World Bank, before something called the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes. Argentina is a regular defendant in those cases. Dozens of cases over the last couple of decades we’ve actually litigated and successfully against Argentina in that forum before. The problem is that’s a multi-year process. It’s very disappointing to see the US courts not stepping up to the plate and protecting the US capital markets.

Liz Hoffman:
In the meantime, your stock went from 15 bucks to a little under five bucks today. This is a bit of a gut check moment for the investment community. You started at the top comparing these financial assets to receivables, which have clear line of sight for credit card bills that are going to be coming due and that this is shaped like that from Wall Street’s point of view, but actually functions very differently and there’s more risk than we thought. What are you telling your investors?

Chris Bogart:
Yeah, I don’t think that there was more risk than we thought. I think what happens though when you have a very large judgment like this is if you go back and look at our stock over time, you’ll see that our stock went way up when we won the judgment against Argentina. And so now it’s gone back to basically where it was before there was any Argentina judgment. So the market has basically just reversed the positive that happened two or three years ago.
So I don’t think it’s a gut check so much. I think it’s a fairly rational asset valuation dynamic, but the market was because the reversal rates are so low at the Second Circuit, like Judge Prescott, the former chief judge who made the trial court level award, her reversal rate in the Second Circuit is 4%. When she wrote a $16 billion judgment, the market quite logically said, “Okay, well, the odds of that judgment being money good are very high and so therefore will inflate Burford stock.”
When the Second Circuit comes along and says, “Okay, well, we’re going to do the unthinkable and we’re going to reverse that.” Then of course our stock fell again.

Rohan Goswami:
The last really big Argentina case in the Second Circuit in this vein was Paul Singer’s case. This is the Argentina case that we’re alluding to. And this was the NML Capital case, and that was about 13 years ago. And there, the Second Circuit did affirm Elliot’s rights, and that went up all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to overturn the Second Circuit. Something does seem to have changed just on the face of it in the last 12 years.

Chris Bogart:
Well, it’s certainly anxiety provoking. The Second Circuit did in fact uphold Elliot’s goal here. And Elliot, remember, was engaged in something considerably more aggressive than we were.

Rohan Goswami:
Yes. They were literally charting out a new shape of law in real time.

Chris Bogart:
Well, they were, but they were doing it as the owner of the underlying asset. So what Elliot did is Elliot bought these defaulted bonds at a low price and then litigated to try to get a higher price for them. We’re not doing that at all. We don’t own this asset. We’re just providing the capital at the request of a bankruptcy court. And sure, we stand to gain a contingency style fee if we’re successful because look, we’ve put $100 million into this over the last decade and we’ve spent 11 years doing this.
That’s by the way, the reason that you need people like us because if you don’t have somebody with a large diversified portfolio in the way that we do, you’re never going to be able to bring a case like that. This bankruptcy estate could never have summoned up $100 million in 11 years of litigation management expertise. So it was very surprising to us to get that result because it does, as you said, Rohan, create a deviation from my perspective from the path that I would have thought the Second Circuit should be staying on.

Rohan Goswami:
There’s an obvious inefficiency here to your point. You as a publicly traded company, you can’t be a law firm. You can’t in-house this. You can’t extract the cost savings that you would be able to if these were the attorneys that you employed. Instead, you’re turning to litigation boutiques or big law firms to do this for you and that’s super expensive and it will only get more expensive with the way rate cards have been going for the last 10 years. You’ve started taking stakes or looking for stakes in law firms. For our audience that doesn’t quite understand why law firms can’t be publicly traded as the law stands right now, can you walk them through that?

Chris Bogart:
In the US, and this is a country by country and as to the US, it is a state by state issue. But in the US, 49 of the 50 states don’t allow law firms to share their revenue with non-lawyers so that the only thing you can do as a law firm is have the partnership sharing in the profits that the firm is creating. And that not only prevents external capital, whether it’s public market investors or private equity funds from investing in law firms, it also, by the way, deprives partners in law firms from getting exit value for the equity value that they’re creating.
They have no way of monetizing that value that they’ve created over time. That is simply the set of rules in the US and there is not an enormous groundswell of effort to change them. Arizona is an exception to this. Arizona saw a market opportunity and opened the doors to non-lawyer ownership of law firms and that has resulted in a little boom of activity in Arizona as people, including one of the big accounting firms, set up law firms that they could own in Arizona. But for that to be really effective, it’s fine to do this activity in Arizona, but Arizona with all due respect to Phoenix-

Liz Hoffman:
No one’s going to give up their New York office for Scottsdale office.

Chris Bogart:
Exactly.

Liz Hoffman:
Yes.

Chris Bogart:
Until you can have that happen in a more national way, it’s not going to fundamentally change the world. Now there’s an interesting question about whether this will happen if you allow it to anyway, because you look across the pond, England has allowed non-lawyer ownership in law firms for 20 years now and you’ve had a lot of activity. There are about a thousand law firms in the UK that are owned by people other than lawyers, but most of them are not in that sort of the Wall Street, high street-

Liz Hoffman:
They’re not the magic circle firms, right? These are-

Chris Bogart:
They are not magic circle firms. So people are doing interesting things at the consumer level, at the real estate level. So now you can go to a law firm that does it all for you when you buy a house. So that’s fine. That’s great, but that’s not the business that I’m in. But Freshfields is not yet attempting to go public.

Liz Hoffman:
But this is what people said, the investment banks said this in the 1980s, they were private partnerships and they had their code of ethics and they would never and the commercial interest and all that. And some of that changed because they need a balance sheet in a way that perhaps law firms don’t. With a commercial pull of just getting fabulously wealthy taking your law firm public, why isn’t there more of a groundswell? And is it going to end up with a fight in Albany with the ABA? Is it just stupid local politics? How is the dam not broken on this?

Chris Bogart:
Well, far be it for me to ever think that investment bankers might get together and talk about what they’re going to do together. Look, I think one of the principle barriers to this happening is that doing this individually is scary because if you are the only law firm that goes and tries to do this, there’s a risk that you’re going to be at a competitive disadvantage because fine, you go and sell 20% of yourself to a private investor like me. Well, now you’re playing with 80 cent dollars while your competitor down the road is still playing with 100 cent dollars for partner compensation. So it needs to all happen at once and that’s exactly what happened with the investment banks. You click your fingers and all of a sudden we had private partnerships moving to public and it wasn’t just one of them. It was a whole group of them.

Rohan Goswami:
Let’s take another quick break. We’ll be back with more from Chris after this. You went as an investment banker from being a lifer at a firm and cradle to grave there to a degree of mobility that has continued for the last 30 years at the very top of investment banking, something which law historically had been immune to but now is not. And every day it feels like we read stories of these fantastic pay packages. Is the fear that you won’t be able to compensate rainmakers with 80 cent dollars as opposed to 100 cent dollars part of why you think there’s maybe a hesitancy and a lack of the groundswell?

Chris Bogart:
I do think it’s a collective action problem though, because when I talk to managing partners of law firms, it used to be... To your point, lawyers didn’t move around very much and there wasn’t a lot of technology in law. And so you didn’t really need capital to begin with. You weren’t really investing in very much stuff. When I was a young lawyer, what did that mean? I had an office and a laptop, that was it.
Today, law firms need to invest in two things. Number one, Rohan, to your point, they need to invest in people. They need to be giving those enormous guarantees to the partner that Kirkland today lured from Paul, Weiss and that tomorrow Paul, Weiss is going to lure back from Kirkland. And number two, law is not surprisingly an industry that is on the early edge of being significantly disrupted by AI.
Large language models are large language models. Law is a large language. And so law firms need to be investing in technology in a way that they have not historically had to do. And so they need those two sources of capital. And right now the only way for them to pay for that capital is to cut their partner compensation or to borrow from a bank, which partners are personally on the hook for.

Liz Hoffman:
That’s ended badly before.

Chris Bogart:
Yeah. So those are not great options.` And so it’s logical for them to want to do this, which is why 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 waiting for somebody else to try to take the next step and we also do need some regulatory relief.

Rohan Goswami:
Seems like you are in a great position to actually put that dinner together yourself and book out a private room and surprise all these guys. “Surprise, you’re all here now. Let’s get down to basics here.”

Liz Hoffman:
It’s a problem that the appetite is there from the big law firms, but that actually the ABA is run by a bunch of sole practitioners.

Chris Bogart:
There’s a little bit of that, but it’s not even an ABA thing. New York could on its own open the door to doing this.

Liz Hoffman:
But the trial lawyers give all the money to people running for the state assembly. There’s some weird entrenched interests.

Chris Bogart:
There are. But the other thing you can do, if there was a real desire to do this is without wanting to go too deeply into the weeds in this stuff, there’s a plan B if you really were keen to do this, which is an MSO structure.

Liz Hoffman:
Walk us through what that is.

Chris Bogart:
Yeah. So when you think about law firms, the prohibition that we’re talking about here, the regulatory, the ethical prohibition is as to the provision of legal services. Law firms do lots of things that are beyond the core provision of legal advice. If you’re going to trial, what’s a law firm doing? Well, yes, there are lawyers going to trial and standing up in court and making arguments and that’s a legal activity, but they’re also renting hotel space and hiring court reporters, and bringing in expert witnesses and doing all sorts of things that they may profit on and that they charge their clients for that are not technically legal services.

Rohan Goswami:
Sure.

Chris Bogart:
And so what you can do is you can separate those two things and you can say, “Okay, fine, we’re just going to have the law firm do the legal services. And then over here we’re going to have a non-law firm structure that provides all the services to the law firm. And that non-legal structure, the managed services organization or the MSO, that can be owned by third parties.” It’s not uncomplicated to set that up, but it’s not impossible either. If you are a law firm that really wants to do this and you either don’t think you can or you don’t want to wait for the regulatory relief, that’s the road by which you would go.

Liz Hoffman:
And MSO is where you take the outside money or you take that thing public and it becomes-

Chris Bogart:
Exactly.

Liz Hoffman:
Is that a one-to-one where Skadden would have its own and Wachtell would have its own? Or is there an industry utility that could get a bunch of these non-legal fees and then go public with that business model?

Chris Bogart:
Well, I think it depends a little bit on size and inclination. There’s no reason that you couldn’t have commingled ones, but my guess is that a Wachtell is not going to commingle an MSO with Skadden.

Liz Hoffman:
But is that something you’d be interested in financing? Would you put-

Chris Bogart:
Yeah, absolutely. So when you look at what we do in the UK, we have an equity stake in a law firm in the UK. We have an equity stake in another firm called Kindleworth that stands up smaller law firms. So if you are today a litigation partner at a big firm and you’re frustrated with the conflicts or something and you want to go out on your own-

Rohan Goswami:
Not uncommon.

Chris Bogart:
... that’s actually hard to do and lawyers don’t have any business experience about doing things like that. So you’ll go to these guys at Kindleworth and they’ll stand you up instead. And they’ve stood up lots of boutiques that have gone on to be significantly successful law firms. And we’ll provide the financing for that. So yes, we’re active in all of those places and happy to do it and we’d be happy to do it in the US as well.

Rohan Goswami:
Isn’t part of the problem there, right? The MSO part of the business, the document review or the services is exactly the part of law that is going to demolish the business model of a Latham & Watkins. And if you believe this theory of the case, make all the mega shops boutiques again because AI over time will do this and law firms just won’t be able to charge for it anymore because anyone can do this and it’ll really go back to being like a very boutiquey, very sole practitioner model.

Chris Bogart:
Look, I think it’s certainly a risk. Thus far, you’ve seen a world where that risk has not showed itself in economic reality. The numbers are just out a couple of weeks ago for 2025’s law firm numbers. The top 25 firms still are posting another year of double-digit profit growth, another year double-digit revenue growth. And that’s been happening year after year. The CAGRs here are remarkable when you look at where these law firms were five or 10 years ago and where they are today. So you’re not seeing it in the numbers and you’re not seeing it in the behavior yet of either clients or the senior lawyers at law firms.
In fact, just this morning in The American Lawyer, there was an article about how AI is enabling senior lawyers to charge yet more. The greater challenge is as you go down the market, right? The next time you need a will written, a house closed, a trust drafted, are you still going to be prepared? And I think there’s a genuine question about what you do to become a really good senior lawyer if today all of the things that you do as a junior lawyer can be done just as efficiently by an LM.

Liz Hoffman:
Do you talk to a lot of general counsels though? Do you get the sense that they’re going to start looking at their bills and saying, “Why am I being billed for a $1,500 associate hour?”

Chris Bogart:
Yeah, I think they’ve been doing that for years though. And the problem remains that today if you’re a director of a Fortune 500 company that’s about to do a capital raising or an M&A transaction, you want, fill in the blank of the favorite law firm that you like, but you want the brand name of that law firm associated with your deal. And that’s why you have seen the tolerance for these rates, which are counterintuitive, right? Why are law firm rates going up faster than corporate profits? It doesn’t make any sense, but the reality is there’s brand power that people are willing to pay for and that’s why you’ve seen this continued widening between the top of the funnel, the top 50 firms in the country and the pressure that is on the 500th fee.

Liz Hoffman:
No, I say it’s a classic Veblen good that actually you don’t sell more of it if you charge less for it, that there’s especially at the top.

Chris Bogart:
Yeah. Yeah.

Liz Hoffman:
But okay, let me try a theory on for you, which is I don’t think that AI is going to kill the law firm, but I do think it might kill the billable hour. I think famously Wachtell sends these forced services rendered with a large number and who quite knows how they got there, but they bill like investment banks and-

Rohan Goswami:
And they get paid.

Liz Hoffman:
And they get paid and there’s success fees, which exist other places, but Wachtell is the true essence of that billing model. Do you think that that’s what the future of law firm economics looks like? “We do a lot of work for you. It went great. Here is a very large number. Please send us the money”?

Chris Bogart:
I think it depends a lot on the kind of thing that you’re talking about. So when you look at Wachtell, Wachtell does that when they do successful M&A advice, but Wachtell also does what investment banks do, which is not send that big bill when the deal [inaudible 00:36:55]. When you are dealing with other kinds of legal services, it’s much less common to have that dynamic. It’s much less common to say, “Okay, well, yes, we did this piece of litigation before you took 10 years.” Still, the general MO, the general modus operandi there is the billable hour. I hate the billable hour. I’ve been campaigning against it since 1998. When I was general counsel at Time Warner, we did the AOL transaction and I insisted doing that transaction on a non-billable hour basis. I actually did it on a contingency fee basis.

Liz Hoffman:
Wait, how did you set that up? I’m curious. This is going to be the second thing that deals famous for other reasons, but we’re going to make it famous for this.

Chris Bogart:
Yeah, no, I went to the law firm that was representing Time Warner. It was Cravath, and I said, “Let’s do a deal.” And by the way, this is in the days of purchase accounting. And so it was very much in my interest. If the deal closed, even paying a big fee would disappear in the midst of purchase accounting. Whereas if the deal didn’t close, then the entirety of what I was going to pay in legal fees was going to hit my P&L and destroy my budget. And so I basically went to Cravath and said, “All right, I’ll pay you a big premium if the deal closes because purchase scanning, and if it doesn’t close, you’re on risk and you’ll write the time off.” And they did that deal.

Liz Hoffman:
How big a check did you ultimately write them?

Chris Bogart:
I think at the time... These sound like small numbers today, but they were big numbers at the time. I think it was 40 or $50 million.

Liz Hoffman:
That’s pretty good.

Chris Bogart:
It was investment banking style-

Liz Hoffman:
It’s possible that Cravath came out the best of anyone in the AOL, Time Warner deal ultimately.

Chris Bogart:
And I’ve long wanted law firms to be that way. I’ve long wanted legal services to be sold on a basis that values efficiency and value creation as opposed to the passive time. You can go back 30 years and find me railing about this stuff and here we are today, the billable hours still reigns supreme.

Liz Hoffman:
Do you think law firms are going to start sending bills that have how many AI tokens they used on it? Is that going to be a new economic unit?

Chris Bogart:
Only, to Rohan’s point, once they stop being able to bill for the associate, but I think their preference will clearly be to continued bill for the associate using the AI tokens.

Liz Hoffman:
But can I just ask, can I have you lay out 10 years in the future, what does the business of law look like? Are there fewer law firms? Are they bigger? Are they more commoditized? Are they just a bunch of senior partners out driven up business? Is there, to your point, a thriving? You’ve got the investment banks change their business model and there’s a whole capital markets machine behind them. What does the business of law look like in 10 years?

Chris Bogart:
I think you’re right, but I would differentiate actually between corporate and securities work and litigation work. And here, once again, we’re just talking about the big law firms. And the reason I say that is I think that the corporate and securities work will continue to cease consolidation. I think you’ll continue to see a smaller number of law firms that are very large that are managed as professional businesses that continue to have the Kirkland, Paul, Weiss, Latham style dynamics associated with them. I think that’s the direction of travel.
However, for so long as there is really any ethical dynamic to the practice of law, which certainly gets chipped away at every year, client conflicts in that dynamic get worse and worse and worse for litigators. And so what I think you’ll see as well is a world and you already see this trend of the increasing move of really good litigators to boutiques. And I think you’ll see that trend continuing as well because the number of conflicts that you have at some of these law firms is so large that you’re turning away so much of the business that you would otherwise do as a litigator.
And so I also think that you’ll see litigation moving more and more and more as just a service function in the big law firms and the people that for that bet the company case are going to come from somewhere else, are going to come from the boutiques and from litigation specialists.

Liz Hoffman:
Interesting.

Chris Bogart:
And Quinn Emmanuel is the poster child of that.

Liz Hoffman:
Totally. And I’ve actually always thought that John is the poster child for someone who might test the going public theory that we were talking about before, like super interesting business case, owns a lot of the firm. But the big breakaway we saw last year was the litigation group that came out of Paul, Weiss after the big White House fight. And I think Karen Dunn and that group, it’d be really interesting to watch what they get up to unshackled from whatever that was.

Chris Bogart:
Exactly. But to your point about John Quinn, for those of you who don’t know that, John Quinn started Quinn Emanuel literally from scratch. I’ve known him forever. I was one of his first clients and has grown that firm to clearly something that on any valuation metric is a multi-billion dollar business. And today after spending 30 years creating that equity value, everywhere else you go in the market, you could, as you walk out the door, participate in the creation of that equity value and today John can’t. And that’s, I think, the motivation for so many partners who look back on their careers and say, “Look at all the value I’ve created. If I’d started an AI technology company, hell, I’d be rolling in money and today I’m leaving it to the next generation as a charitable act.”

Rohan Goswami:
We’ve talked a lot about what AI has or will do to law firms. What has done to your business?

Chris Bogart:
Technology has been great for us. And look, I’m a technologist at heart, so I’ve been investing in advanced technology in this business for the last decade. So it’s not just AI as we talked about it today, but it makes our investment decisions better, it makes our process more efficient and it also lets us engage with information in a way that we wouldn’t be able to manually. Let me give you just one example of that. There are today hundreds of thousands of federal court cases and millions of state court cases filed every year in this country. The number is something like 12 and a half million if you add all of those together. And most of those cases don’t have a specified dollar value in them. They just say, “Oh, for the damages that’ll be proved at trial,” or something. We would like as a business development matter to be able to identify in that pool the cases that meet our kind of financing criteria.

Rohan Goswami:
Based on past outcomes of analogous cases put together like a back of the envelope?

Chris Bogart:
Or based simply on size and type, based simply on like, “Give me every case that I think is going to be worth more than a hundred million dollars.” We have had no ability manually to do that. It’s such a large pool. You can’t possibly wade through the filings even if you could get your hands on them. So we have built our own AI tool that reads those newly filed complaints and tries to assess what their value is likely to be so that we can winnow that pool down to a manageable pool to actually approach.

Rohan Goswami:
Has that actually filled your pipeline? Have you financed a case based off of that tool since you’ve launched it?

Chris Bogart:
What we use that for is a different kind of business development because once you’ve actually filed the case already, you’ve probably already figured out how you’re going to pay for it. But it’s a lot easier for us to have the conversation with the general counsel that says, “Hey, we know you’re going to down the road on this case. You could have done such and so and plant the seed for the future.” It’s an easier conversation than us just picking up the phone and saying, “Hey, let me talk to you about the wonderful world of litigation finance.”

Liz Hoffman:
You obviously have your own funding, your public company, you’ve raised money that way. We’ve talked a lot on this show about everything is now an asset class and every cash flow is going to be securitized and end up somewhere inside Apollo’s insurance business or whatever. When you think about, and as you said, you’ve created an asset out of essentially nothing here, like what the appetite is, where you think the growth is, how big is this industry? Is it in fact happening somewhere inside Apollo’s insurance business ultimately?

Chris Bogart:
I think it’s big because this is a lot of money. If you think about the size of the legal market, law firms bill about a trillion dollars a year, globally. Now, not all of that is in litigation, not all of that is in the kind of litigation that I would finance. I’m not suggesting that’s my addressable market, but that just gives you a sense of the scale of the legal industry and that doesn’t include the underlying value of the assets. That doesn’t include the litigation value, that’s just the legal fees.
So there are huge amounts of money here and just as it didn’t make very good sense for lots of businesses to be buying their own capital equipment on their own balance sheet and once leasing came along, it made a lot of sense for lots of businesses to lease their capital equipment. The same argument applies here. It makes lots of sense for lots of businesses not to divert their own growth capital to litigation. It makes a lot more sense for them to use our capital. I went out on a stage six months ago and predicted that we were going to double the size of our business in five years and I still believe that.

Liz Hoffman:
And you’re talking mostly about litigation, but we talked earlier about how you structured that Time Warner deal. If a big company were doing that today and Cravath said, “Yeah, we’ll take it, but actually we want to sell this claim at 85 cents on the dollar.” Is that a business that you’re... Are there more opportunities outside of litigation? You want to securitize M&A fees basically is what I’m asking. Is there my two great loves?

Chris Bogart:
Yeah, we have done things like that outside of litigation. We’ve done a world where we can look at the idea of effectively insuring broken deal discounts and so on. And I think those exist. I think they are smaller addressable markets than the core litigation function because litigation is both so expensive and so long term. And so even if you’ve got a terrific case as a company, you’re signing up for five years or more of negative P&L impact before you get a positive below the line cash event. That’s just a bad combination for an operating business.

Liz Hoffman:
Okay. Then as we make it easier to finance anything, we get a lot more of that thing. And I think your critics would say, “Are we building a world where we are incentivizing litigation that doesn’t otherwise need to be there?” How do you think about that?

Rohan Goswami:
Chubb notably was very impressive.

Liz Hoffman:
Yeah, Chubb is pretty mad about this. The insurers are pretty mad at this.

Rohan Goswami:
I have been pretty mad at you about this for a while.

Chris Bogart:
I think you have to separate what we do, which is large dollar complex litigation and the whole American world of consumer tort injury litigation, which we don’t do at all. The world that we’re in, it’s completely unfounded. The presence or the absence of our capital is not going to determine whether a company is going to bring a hundred plus million dollar claim for damages. It’s just not. The question is the most efficient financial way for the company to do that. But there’s no company out there that is saying, “Oh, well, if Burford gives me the money, then I’ll sue for $500 million. And if they don’t, well, then I just want it. I’ll just forget that and move on.” So I don’t think it’s an issue with the world that we’re in.
I do think that the United States has a litigation problem when it comes to consumer tort style actions. I think that creates a cost for businesses that is higher than it should be, but I don’t think litigation funding adds to that problem because we already have such a robust contingency system for those kinds of claims because they’re simply not that expensive. And so you can hang out a shingle as a lawyer and you can make the economics work with a pool of auto claims. You don’t need external financing to make that happen. But I think that that has called out for a long time for various levels of structural reform and they’re still missing.

Liz Hoffman:
And now we’re back to the trial lawyers and their political donations, fact of life.

Chris Bogart:
Well, political donations and also the fact that we’ve made a conscious choice as a society not to have government engage in those things. I’m Canadian originally, grew up in Canada. You don’t see the same kind of litigation in Canada as you do in the US because there are lots of things that the government health system is taking care of where here you need private compensation for. So it’s not just the trial lawyers, it’s a whole construct of how you want society to operate.

Liz Hoffman:
I always assumed it was just Canadians were just nicer, but that’s a structural point.

Chris Bogart:
That’s true.

Liz Hoffman:
Well, listen, this was a lot of fun. Is there anything that we didn’t cover that’s been on your mind?

Chris Bogart:
I think that was pretty darn thorough.

Liz Hoffman:
Great.

Chris Bogart:
But you’ve got this new podcast talking about financialization and I think this is a pretty interesting example of exactly what you say is going on because 20 years ago, none of this was happening.

Liz Hoffman:
No. I mean, you talk to the people at the alternate resident managers and they just cannot find enough assets. They have these liability machines and they say, “God, we need a cash flow that fits this hole.” And actually the thing we didn’t talk about that we can lease in as we do our debrief is that the one nice thing they like is that this has historically anyway been uncorrelated with other things. So it is this particularly juicy piece of risk that fits nicely in. But Chris, this was a lot of fun. Thank you so much for coming.

Rohan Goswami:
This was great. Thanks, Chris, so much.

Chris Bogart:
Thank you very much [inaudible 00:49:49]

Rohan Goswami:
Liz, I’m surprised it took you so long to have Chris on the podcast because this is the perfect confluence of all your favorite things, law, M&A, and the financialization of the entire world. I know you know Chris really well. What’d you make of what he had to say today?

Liz Hoffman:
Yeah, I mean, look, he’s an evangelist for a new investment class and Burford is, I think, the biggest fish in it. They have some growing competition. But I think litigation finance is still in its early days and will continue to grow because as he says, it’s solving a real problem for corporate general counsel. But I think his comments, he’s obviously just spent a lot of time thinking about what the future of the business of law looks like. His for the moment is being a financial player in it, but obviously has some ambitions to be a principal too.

Rohan Goswami:
But he’s also in that weird position where right now he is hurt by the direction that rate cards are going in. He doesn’t have an in-house staff of attorneys litigating this forum, but he also stands if there are MSO structures in the US to be a beneficiary. He’s really lawful neutral in all of this and seem pretty clearheaded in saying what about this.

Liz Hoffman:
Lawful neutral in the matrix.

Rohan Goswami:
Yeah.

Liz Hoffman:
No, I mean, I think he’s probably helped by rate cards going up because again, this is a cost to companies who are trying to figure out how to do it.

Rohan Goswami:
To a degree, but then you have a YPF where there is a possibility that you will just have to eat that cost and it will be 100 million or 110 million on your books that you don’t get back.

Liz Hoffman:
Yeah. I mean, I think just at the 10,000-foot level, this is a business model that just would be totally recognizable if you dropped a lawyer from 1960 into a law firm today. Yeah, they’re making more money and there’s some computers, but this business model hasn’t changed and that’s unbelievably unique. I mean, you just can’t think of something that is as lucrative as Chris says. I mean, the profits on these law firms, these are huge businesses. And it’s funny, some of them now have actually someone with a CEO title, but when I was covering law firms even 10, 15 years ago, there was a managing partner, but no one was really running these things like businesses.

Rohan Goswami:
There was no business guy. Yes, exactly.

Liz Hoffman:
No. And you started... The really good business development, the really good charismatic partners were also doing the work and getting the business and just, no one was running these things like rate companies. And I think that has started to change a little. You’ve seen a lot of mergers because law firms have had to out of weakness merge and that requires someone to be in charge of actually running the company.

Rohan Goswami:
Yeah. The integration guy or girl usually becomes the leader of the ship there.

Liz Hoffman:
Yeah. But I really think that this entire industry is on the precipice of unrecognizable change and I don’t think they’re going to let an ABA rule or whatever Arizona is doing stand in the way, that will get fixed. And I fully expect there to be a fight in New York and Texas and California states without... If you don’t have an office there, you cannot compete.

Rohan Goswami:
You cannot. Yeah.

Liz Hoffman:
I think that we’re going to see that in a serious way in the next year or two.

Rohan Goswami:
And you and I have talked really more than I would’ve ever thought to human beings could ever talk this about the collapse of the leverage model. And he did acknowledge that the MSO is a business model under threat. I wish we’d had more time to push him on this because-

Liz Hoffman:
No, the MSO is the good business in it.

Rohan Goswami:
No, but for now-

Liz Hoffman:
It is the business-

Rohan Goswami:
No. No-

Liz Hoffman:
... that can take outside capital, right?

Rohan Goswami:
Yeah. It is the good business in that it’s an investible business. But I still think what is the first thing that the Harvey’s or the AI companies of the world that are focused on law will disrupt and make unbillable or will force, to your point, to your half joke, force law firms to bill as tokens. It’ll be document review. It’ll be processes. It’ll be so much of the redlining that right now anywhere from a first to a seventh year associate can charge for and charge a lot for, but which you won’t be able to do because to Chris’s point, law is a large language. There’s a lot of what law does that can be automated. Again, not the finer points of M&A, not the finesse of a litigator, but the lion’s share of how Latham makes its money, of how K&E makes this money, of how Paul, Weiss to a degree makes his money is from these rote repeated tasks where you have 15 associates on there and there the MSO is disruptable and is not a long-term solution for these guys taking money, I don’t think.

Liz Hoffman:
The other force that I think is pushing in this direction is that private equity firms, two big asset managers, have become the largest clients of these law firms.

Rohan Goswami:
Well, yes.

Liz Hoffman:
And so the lawyers that I spend time talking to, they hang out with their clients and they’re like, “Oh wait, I get it.” It has made lawyers themselves a lot more commercial animals. And I think they’re just going to realize that they are for the moment at the high end being paid really well, but that their business is not profit maxing as they say.

Rohan Goswami:
Okay, well, let’s avoid the maxing here. There was a wave in the 2010s and the early 2020s of private equity firms, KKR and CVC and others buying up stakes or wholesale buying PR shops, which you and I have also talked about, never really made sense because these are people businesses and are lumpy and dangerous and risky that way. And what do you make of that risk if PE wants to get involved in law, where you do have a couple superstar lawyers that we all know at every shop that drive a huge portion of revenue for the M&A groups, litigation groups? That seems like a pretty big key man risk for a public company. Look at what happened with FTI and Jon Orszag when he left or for a private equity investment.

Liz Hoffman:
I mean, one thing private equity is very good at when they buy a company is figuring out who is good and locking them in. So actually I think that would probably be a problem that solves itself in a way that is generational wealth inducing for the top percent.

Rohan Goswami:
But the thing is they’re already getting generational wealth. I saw someone as getting a hundred million or 80 million over three years. That is generational wealth. That is absolutely generational wealth even after New York-

Liz Hoffman:
For sure. But John Quinn owns a majority, I believe, of Quinn Emanuel and he has billions of dollars as Chris was saying of paper wealth-

Rohan Goswami:
Yes.

Liz Hoffman:
... that he doesn’t quite know what to do with. Or maybe he does know what to do with and that’ll be a new story you can ask him.

Rohan Goswami:
And you’ll ask him you’re Milken and he will tell you for the 31st time, that’ll be the charm.

Liz Hoffman:
Yeah, I think that’s the key. But no, I mean, this is just a business model that has not changed and I think we’re living in a world where that’s not going to continue to be true all that much longer.

Rohan Goswami:
Yeah. I mean, look, you and I have talked at length about getting a really great law firm CEO or lawyer to come on and talk about the changes that are coming to the law firm model. And I’m actually really thrilled that Chris was the answer to that, like a lawyer but not doing the law, very much thinking about it.

Liz Hoffman:
He’s a lawyer who knows how to talk about money.

Rohan Goswami:
Yes.

Liz Hoffman:
That is in fact the difference. Yeah.

Rohan Goswami:
Yes. But I thought he was just wonderful. Great interview.

Liz Hoffman:
And I like that he shares my long-term eulogy for the billable hour, at least in certain contexts. I remember my dad was a lawyer and I remember growing up and going to his office and had little red book on his desk and back then they build, I think then in 15 minute increments and now I’m reliably told it’s down to six minutes.

Rohan Goswami:
Yes.

Liz Hoffman:
What a deranged way to live your life.

Rohan Goswami:
It’s insane. Yeah, much, much has changed, much more change to come. Well, that’s it for us this week. Thanks for listening to Compound Interest from Semafor Business. Our show is produced by the wonderful Josh Billinson.

Liz Hoffman:
A special thanks to Anna Pizzino, Katherine Bilgore, Claire Einstein, Rachel Oppenheim, Tori Kuhr, Vilanna Wang, Garrett Wiley, Stephanie Chang, and Daniel Hoeft. Our engineer is Bob Mallory and our theme music is by Steve Bone.

Rohan Goswami:
Damn, you crushed that. If you like Compound Interest, please follow us wherever you get your podcast and don’t forget to review us.

Liz Hoffman:
And if you want more, you can always sign up to get Semafor Business in your inbox.

Rohan Goswami:
That was insane. You just ran through that like... That was crazy.