March 2021
Case
HBS Case Collection

Litigation Finance 2.0: LexShares

By: Lauren Cohen, Spencer C. N. Hagist and Yago Zavalia Gahan

Format:Print
| Language:English
| Pages:23

Abstract

Litigation finance—also referred to as third party litigation funding—was in its relative infancy as an asset class when Jay Greenberg and Max Volsky made a platform-play in the space. Seven years later, the market was far from "mainstream," but nonetheless had grown significantly, as had the litigation financing platform they founded, LexShares. They faced a cross-roads on what came next for LexShares—whether 1) to continue on with a focus to grow its platform marketplace for legal cases that outside investors could invest in; or 2) put a relatively larger focus on building their own asset management arm that sourced, chose, and invested in hand-picked cases for outside investors in a fund capacity. Greenberg knew that (2) might seriously encroach on (1), and was fraught with missteps shown through past unsuccessful platform transitions—but the potential upside provided by (2) had the potential to be nothing short of company-changing.