Opportunities for Entrepreneurial Litigators in Biglaw

Lee Drucker

The so-called rainmakers in biglaw firms throughout the country have traditionally built high-end business litigation practices by cultivating relationships with the largest corporations and their general counsel, clients that generally were less financially constrained and thus more likely to accept the hourly rate billing structure over the long course of complex litigation. With the advent of litigation finance, and firms such as Lake Whillans, entrepreneurial litigators at large firms have a new path to building sustainable high-end litigation business that is attractive to biglaw firms. Rather than the more traditional focus on companies with relatively unconstrained litigation budgets and strong balance sheets, entrepreneurial litigators at large firms have begun to realize that litigation financing affords them the opportunity to build practices by targeting companies with often severe financial constraints but meritorious claims, often against larger companies, requiring complex and expensive litigation. Lawyers in biglaw that have had experience in third party funded cases find that litigation finance can overcome the common practical constraints that have made biglaw often resistant to contingency fee arrangements, reduced or capped fees with success premiums.

Those constraints flow from a number of challenges facing large law firms:

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