Litigation Finance: Helping Break the Glass Ceiling

In today’s world, discussions of gender-gaps and gender equality are relatively common.  We’ve seen great progress being made for women in lots of areas and the legal world is no exception to that.  In fact, at law schools and among law school graduates there is becoming more and more equality in the ratio of men to women, which is a great thing.  However, Aviva Will, former assistant general counsel at Time Warner Inc. and now managing director of a large litigation finance company suggests that there is still a large gender gap in legal leadership. But Will suggests litigation finance could step in to help solve the problem.

From what the data shows, women are going to law school and graduating law school and entering into legal jobs but then they are disappearing.  Presumably this is still because of the traditional role that women feel they must play in motherhood.  But this means that the overwhelming majority of leadership in the legal field is all men and at the rate things are going this will not change for decades because there has only been a slight increase in women holding leadership positions year-over-year.

But as Will points out, litigation finance is available equally to everyone.  Therefore, she suggests four specific ways female attorneys can use litigation finance to their benefit in their practice:

• First, women attorneys can use the support of litigation finance to convince the firm’s contingency fee committee to accept a case that they would usually decline.
• Secondly, they can present litigation finance to their client as a way to fund their litigation without adding much pressure or risk to the client or their business.
• Women attorney’s can use litigation finance to land new clients by showing that she already has a plan in place to successful take on their case.
• Lastly, an in-house attorney can use litigation finance to transform her team for a cost center to a profit center for the organization.

In each of these suggestions it’s not exactly what is being done that is impressive for women attorneys but rather it presents impressive skills and understanding to both colleagues and clients.  Using litigation finance in these ways shows that the female attorney is driven, an innovative thinker, ambitious about landing new clients, that she is financially aware, and ultimately that she possesses leadership ability.  It is by showcasing these skills and abilities that women will hopefully begin to be recognized by their peers, supervisors, and clients that they are leaders in the workplace just like men.

Topics:  litigation finance, alternative litigation finance, third-party funding, gender-gap, women in law

 Works Cited:  Aviva Will, Litigation Finance Can Help Break the Glass Ceiling, Law360 (July 15, 2015).