2022 Azbee Awards of Excellence

Category

Online > Web Feature Article > Mid Atlantic

Awarded to

Valerie Bauman, Senior Investigative Reporter; Roy Strom, Correspondent

Entry details

Clients Cry Foul Over Litigious Litigation Finance Company

Issue or publication date: Nov. 17, 2021
Publication name: Bloomberg Law
Publishing/parent company: Bloomberg Industry Group
Website home page: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/

About the publication's mission and readership:

https://www.bloombergindustry.com/about-us/

Description of the enterprising work that went into this entry and its significance or impact on readers:

Litigation finance has grown into a more than $10 billion industry in the United States, but how that money is spent is shrouded in secrecy. Bloomberg Law reporters found and followed a money trail left behind by one litigation funder and showed it had a track record of suing its own clients—the lawyers who received investments from Pravati Capital. The story served as a warning to small firm lawyers that litigation finance companies don’t always live up to a simple, oft-repeated promise: That if the case the funder invests in doesn’t make money, the lawyers will not owe any money to the funder. To do that, Bloomberg Law compiled Pravati’s UCC filings, providing a list of roughly 40 lawyers the company had invested in. Bloomberg Law contacted those lawyers and used their names to search public court dockets to ultimately find 15 lawyers who had been in a dispute with Pravati. A handful of them had filed for bankruptcy after doing deals with Pravati. We contacted lawyers who negotiate litigation finance contracts to review Pravat’s deals that ended up as public records to try and explain why these disputes happened so frequently. The story we told showed that Pravati came after numerous lawyers for money even when those lawyers’ cases hadn’t resulted in awards that would trigger repayment to Pravati.

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Entry URL(s), if applicable:
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/clients-cry-foul-over-litigious-litigation-finance-company?context=search&index=1

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