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 ...