Burford Tries Lit Funding to Chip Away at Gender Inequity in Law

Aviva Will had an “aha moment” during the summer of 2017 that led to the creation of the Equity Project, a pool of funding reserved for women-led cases at the world’s largest litigation financier, Burford Capital Ltd.

That summer, Will, Burford’s senior managing director, asked Burford’s in-house quantitative team to run analytics around the data they’d collected about which cases they’d accepted as well as which ones they’d rejected. In doing so, she asked the quant team to pull numbers on gender.

She was shocked at what they found: less than five percent of the cases that came to Burford for funding were run by women lawyers.

“There’s something very wrong with that picture,” Will said.

Last month, as Burford—which has more than $2.32 billion in assets and $391 million in income—celebrated its 10^th anniversary, the Equity Project celebrated its first. In a little over a year the program has begun efforts to mitigate the glaring and difficult problem of gender inequity in the law through the unique lens of funding.

After analyzing the quant team’s data, Will spent a year talking to both male and female lawyers to get a better understanding of the problem. The results were illuminating.

“What I’ve learned is that there are good women litigators, but they are much less likely to go to the contingency committee and ask the firm to take a risk on a case. If a man loses, the attitude is either that the case wasn’t winnable or it’s a learning curve. It’s not the same for a woman,” said Will. Chances are that if a woman loses a contingency case, the firm won’t give her another shot, she said.

The industry-wide problem of gender inequality in the law is well-documented. According to a 2018 survey by the National Association on Women Lawyers, while 47% of associates at the top 200 U.S. law firms are women, just 20% of equity partners are.

And the numbers are equally grim for women in litigation. According to the most recent figures available from the American Bar Association, only 32% of lawyers appearing as trial attorneys in civil cases, and 32% of trial lawyers in criminal cases, are women.

In order to incentivize more women and law firms to take more risks, Burford seeded the Equity Project with $50 million. The funds can be used for cases where a female lawyer is first-chair, is plaintiffs’ lead counsel or on a plaintiffs’ steering committee, or if a female-owned law firm represents the client.

Will said that when the Equity Project launched, she suspected that they would fund cases that only needed $2 million or less. That hasn’t been true. “I’ve been surprised by the size of the cases I’ve seen. The cases we’ve funded are in sync with the larger pool of capital we fund,” she said.

While Burford declined to provide specific figures about the number of cases and the amount of money the firm’s Equity Project has funded thus far, Burford’s spokesperson, Liz Bingham said the venture has been going well. “Through The Equity Project, Burford has funded high-value commercial litigation and international arbitration matters, including some led by all-women teams,” she said.

Will acknowledged that the company has been criticized for devoting a mere fraction of its overall pool of money for the Equity Project. However, she said that Burford first has an obligation to its investors, and will need to track this pool of investments and compare it to how they perform with the overall pool. She added, that the project has “100 percent support from the board and the executive team, and once the $50 million is gone, they will commit more.”

Change comes slowly to Big Law, but Will is cautiously optimistic that Burford can help to accelerate the process.

Good intentions aren’t enough unless they are backed by cash, she said. “I know that women aren’t going to be elected to executive committees unless they generate revenues, and our project aims to help them move in that direction,” she said.

“If you fast forward 10 years, and you see more women are creating business at firms, are generating revenue, and are on compensation committees, the culture of the firms will better fit the way the world is.”