Your company has a sizeable legal claim. So shouldn’t your first call be to an attorney? While it may seem counterintuitive, retaining counsel before exploring other options can severely limit your company’s ability to strike an advantageous arrangement for pursuing its claim. Engaging early with Parabellum preserves options for your company to achieve its litigation goals.
Applying a Business Mindset to Litigation
A legal claim is more than a legal issue. Although it may not feel like one, a claim is also a contingent asset. Deciding how to best to monetize that asset is a business decision. And like other important business decisions, your business should investigate and weigh alternatives before committing to a course of action.
Optionality
Many businesses do not know that options for evaluating, enforcing, and financing affirmative claims exist outside of attorneys. Those options, intelligently considered, can mean the difference between realizing serious value for a claim versus realizing little value at all. Or worse, throwing good money after bad. Unbeknownst to many, once counsel is retained and litigation has commenced, options become increasingly limited.
Parabellum is an end-to-end solution provider for businesses with sizeable legal claims. Unlike other litigation funders that are focused on servicing law firms, we have a team specifically dedicated to businesses with legal claims. We provide transparent options for businesses that wish to maximize the value of their claims. We evaluate claims internally with our own professional underwriting team, allowing us to quickly communicate a perspective on the potential value inherent therein. We develop enforcement strategies that leverage our deep relationships with elite, specialized attorneys that bring investor mindsets to their practices. And we finance our strategies on a fully non-recourse basis – meaning we do not win unless your case is successful.
Alignment
Most importantly, Parabellum is committed to alignment with our clients – more than anything else, we want to make money with clients, not from them. And while it is easy to speak about alignment, achieving it is made more difficult when parties approach us after retaining counsel.
The Relationship Between Optionality and Alignment
Alignment requires that all parties share risk. We only invest in a case if we believe in its merits, and we partner with lawyers who have the same mentality. Lawyers who are not interested in risk-taking drive a divergence of incentives over time that unduly impacts the amount of litigation proceeds that your company ultimately receives.
Time and again, we are approached by parties that have regrettably committed to risk-averse counsel that are unwilling to put “skin in the game,” resulting in inflexible and oversized legal spend due to some or all of the following factors:
- Insistence on billing by the hour in accordance with traditional law firm revenue models
- Conservative budgeting designed to protect a law firm’s realization rates
- Demanding an outsized premium for taking contingency risk
The more ingrained such lawyers are in a case, the less options a party has to strike a business deal with favorable economics. That is because the party has either already incurred considerable legal fees, significant fees are outstanding that must be paid when transitioning to new counsel, or current counsel has accumulated substantial institutional knowledge that cannot be easily transferred.
In addition to economic incentives, alignment also requires the engagement of a well-resourced legal team with specialized knowledge and a track record in obtaining success in similar cases. Not every legal team is the right match for every case. Businesses frequently come to us after retaining attorneys that are either unsuited to the task at hand, or unable to devote the time, attention, and resources necessary for success. All too often, we are approached after critical litigation junctures have passed and irreversible damage has been done. Frequent issues include:
- Lack of specialization and expertise in the legal area at hand
- Insufficient resources to aggressively pursue claims
- A busy docket of other cases that receive higher priority
- Pursuit of a flawed strategy
Retaining Options
Consider your options. And the sooner you do so, the more you will have. Contact us to learn more about how we can contribute our experience, expertise, relationships, and resources to develop aligned and risk-free capital solutions for the successful enforcement and monetization of your company’s claims.
