The litigation funder said that Burford Capital LTD is pledging to double a previous financial commitment to legal industry diversity by investing $100 million in matters where women and minorities have key roles.
Burford launched the Equity Project in 2018 with a commitment to allocate $50 million for women-led commercial litigation cases. The new round will expand funding to litigation and arbitration matters where racially diverse lawyers have prominent positions.
Opening up the program will “address a deficit in representation that is even more acute than the gender gap,” Burford said in its Wednesday announcement.
The legal profession has long lagged in building diversity. According to a recent report by the National Association for Law Placement (NALP), women made up 25.05% of partners in major U.S. law firms in 2020, and people of colour accounted for 10.23%. Those figures represent only a slight gain from 2019, up from 24.17% and 9.55%, respectively.
Burford said its goal is to help women and racially diverse lawyers land leading roles in cases and ease “pathways towards origination and client relationship credit.”
Describing the first iteration of the Equity Project as a “proof of concept” internally, Aviva Will, co-chief operating officer at Burford and leader of the initiative, said she “always knew that we’d come back to the well” if it were successful.
Will, a former senior lawyer at Time Warner Inc and Cravath, Swaine & Moore, said some of the cases funded through the project’s initial earmarked financing are still playing out, but results that have been seen so far are “positive.”
Burford funded fewer cases with the initial pool than it had expected, Will said. While the firm anticipated women might pitch more minor cases to build a book of business – leading to the funds being divvied up across a larger batch – what Burford saw instead was women pitching “significant cases with significant budgets.”
Investments will be made in matters where female or racially diverse lawyers are the first or second chair, earn origination credit or serve as the client relationship manager, Burford said. According to the funder, lawyers may also qualify if they serve as plaintiffs’ lead counsel or chair of a steering committee, or where clients are represented by women or diverse lawyer-owned firms.
Comments are closed.