Modern commercial litigation finance in the United States traces much of its intellectual lineage to a single 2009 article. Jonathan Molot, then a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, published "A Market in Litigation Risk" in the University of Chicago Law Review, proposing that lawyers could team up with outside capital providers to price and absorb litigation risk on behalf of corporate claimants, effectively describing the asset class before it existed at scale.
Molot met Christopher Bogart, a former Cravath, Swaine & Moore lawyer and former general counsel of Time Warner, at a RAND conference, and the two discovered a shared conviction that this market opportunity was real. They founded Burford Capital Limited, incorporating in Guernsey on September 11, 2009 and launching operations that October, in the middle of the global financial crisis, raising $130 million through an initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange's AIM market, with Bogart as CEO and Molot as Chief Investment Officer.
Burford has since grown into the largest publicly traded litigation finance company in the world, organized around two segments: Principal Finance, which deploys capital from Burford's own balance sheet and affiliated private funds, and Asset Management, which manages legal finance assets on behalf of third-party investors. As of early 2026 the company reported a market capitalization of roughly $1.79 billion and trailing twelve-month revenue of about $399 million.