INSIGHTS INTO LITIGATION FINANCE

Changing Landscape of Medtech Innovation

Lee Drucker

Last week in Medcity News, Tiffany Wilson Karp, the executive director of the Global Center for Medical Innovation, discussed the changing landscape for early stage funding in the medical device space, including that “[v]enture capital is essentially out of the early-stage medtech investing business” and that she is “seeing an increased interest from corporate venture capital (large medical device companies, for example) which face gaps in their innovation pipelines in the future and may be open to creative ways to engage with early-stage companies who are working on problems they want to address or product pipelines they want to fill.”

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Silicon Valley is a Paradigm for Lit Finance

Lee Drucker

When I jokingly explained that Lake Whillans was not the Iron Bank of Braavos in my last column, I was pretty sure that that was the last article I would ever write about HBO programming. Then episode 2 of season 2 of Silicon Valley aired on Sunday; the episode, titled Runaway Devaluation, depicts a quintessential paradigm for the use of litigation finance (or distressed venture funding, another financial product we provide).

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Lake Whillans is NOT the Iron Bank of Braavos

Lee Drucker

With all the hype surrounding the first episode of this season’s Game of Thrones, I figured it was time to dispel the rumors: Lake Whillans is NOT the Iron Bank. While both entities can be a great resource in your campaign to vanquish an opponent, there remain a couple key differences.

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Life Science Entrepreneurs Facing Litigation

Lee Drucker

Developing a new product or business in the healthcare space is rife with complexity. Whether it be creating a new medical device, an innovative pharmaceutical, or a digital health business, healthcare entrepreneurs must identify a valuable opportunity, assemble a dedicated and talented team, potentially invest years and abundant resources in R&D – all of which may occur before seeking FDA approval, finding manufacturing partners, or even knowing whether you have a viable product for the market. Given these challenges, the last thing on a CEO’s mind when raising capital or finding partners to navigate these complexities may be how to defend the company if one of these partnerships goes sideways. But what happens if one of these partnerships does go awry? If a partner, having learned the secrets of a company’s technology determines to take that knowledge for itself? (Last week, F. Nicholas Franano, MD, a radiologist and chief executive officer at two cardiovascular medical device companies, Flow Forward Medical and Metactive Medical discussed how companies can best protect themselves when entering these partnerships.) Or if a competitor takes action to derail the company? (here is an in-depth article about a company in that position). Is all of the work of the talented and dedicated people that helped drive the initial success of the company lost?

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Lake Whillans Investment Featured in MEDCITY News

Lee Drucker

An in depth article about a fabulous entrepreneur and promising cancer therapy almost derailed by impropriety. This was one of Lake Whillans’ first investments:

http://medcitynews.com/2015/03/entrepreneur-nearly-lost-company-heres-litigation-finance-helped-fight-back/

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Litigation Finance & Private Equity

Lee Drucker

About a month ago, I discussed the venture capital landscape, and why litigation funders are attractive partners for VCs and VC-backed companies in need of resources to adequately defend their businesses. A similar, but distinct, phenomenon exists in private equity.

Private equity firms (which invest in a broader class of companies and employ a wider array of value generating techniques than venture capital) share some common characteristics that make litigation finance a useful product within the industry.

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Delaware Decision on Work Product for Funding Documents

Lee Drucker

The Delaware Chancery Court handed down a favorable decision on work product protection for funding documents last week. Here are links to an article discussing the decision and the decision itself.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-04/litigation-finance-communications-protected-business-of-law

http://law.justia.com/cases/delaware/court-of-chancery/2015/ca-7841-vcp.html

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Cost of Capital in Litigation Funding

Lee Drucker

At Lake Whillans, I spend most of my time valuing litigation related assets. There are many considerations in this exercise, some of which I wrote about here.

Today, I am going to write about cost of capital, which is a key component in valuation. Aswath Damodaran recently wrote:
“If there were a contest for the most measured number in finance, the winner would be the cost of capital. Corporate finance departments around the world compute it as an integral part of investment analysis. Appraisers estimate it as a step towards estimating intrinsic or discounted cash flow value. Analysts spend disproportionate amounts of their time working on it, though not always for the right reasons or with the right inputs.”

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The best way for companies and their counsel to determine if litigation finance is an attractive option is to discuss it with us.