Compound Interest from Semafor Business
May 13, 2026 · 1 hr · 14 segments
Chris Bogart spent years at Cravath before building Burford Capital into the world's largest litigation finance firm — turning lawsuits into investible assets. Liz and Rohan dig into the…
Chris BogartGuest
Liz HoffmanHost
Rohan GoswamiHost
But, you know, the other thing we talk a lot on the show about is sort of everything is cash flow now and that all kinds of risks are being spun up and molded to fit some funding hole that is sitting inside the empires of Blackstone and Apollo and KKR and all of those firms.
I've just been kind of watching for the better part of a decade now as it's risen is litigation finance.
He is a recovering lawyer, started his career at the whitest of white shoe firms at Cravath, was in-house at Time Warner, has built this business that is starting to attract a lot of attention, a lot of copycats.
When people say we are inventing new asset classes every day, this is what they're talking about.
It's funny, when we were preparing for this, I was reading his exit interview from 2000 from the GC role at Time Warner, back when there were trades beyond Law 360 that covered law.
And what he said was that for his next chapter, he wanted to combine law with business management.
They're trying to, they have taken stakes in law firms, they're financing litigation around the world.
I imagine that in 10 years, Burford is a holding company for a bunch of law firms and law firm services and is a really interesting sort of index fund of what we don't often think of as an industry because it's just like so poorly run and weird.
Very few of them, it's starting to change a little bit, but very few of them have anyone whose business card says CEO.
Chris is waiting for us, so let's pause there, take a quick break, and we'll be back with more.
But, you know, the other thing we talk a lot on the show about is sort of everything is cash flow now and that all kinds of risks are being spun up and molded to fit some funding hole that is sitting inside the empires of Blackstone and Apollo and KKR and all of those firms.
I've just been kind of watching for the better part of a decade now as it's risen is litigation finance.
He is a recovering lawyer, started his career at the whitest of white shoe firms at Cravath, was in-house at Time Warner, has built this business that is starting to attract a lot of attention, a lot of copycats.
When people say we are inventing new asset classes every day, this is what they're talking about.
It's funny, when we were preparing for this, I was reading his exit interview from 2000 from the GC role at Time Warner, back when there were trades beyond Law 360 that covered law.
And what he said was that for his next chapter, he wanted to combine law with business management.
They're trying to, they have taken stakes in law firms, they're financing litigation around the world.
I imagine that in 10 years, Burford is a holding company for a bunch of law firms and law firm services and is a really interesting sort of index fund of what we don't often think of as an industry because it's just like so poorly run and weird.
Very few of them, it's starting to change a little bit, but very few of them have anyone whose business card says CEO.
Chris is waiting for us, so let's pause there, take a quick break, and we'll be back with more.
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