Augusta provides funding for all or part of the cost of conducting legal claims. Funding is available to pay for the cost of pursuing a claim by either litigation or arbitration, including law firm fees, counsel fees, expert fees and other disbursements. Clients may seek funding at any stage and funding is available for all stages in the dispute resolution process, including claim preparation, statements of case/submissions, evidence, mediation, hearing and enforcement.
Augusta’s funding is non-recourse, which means Augusta will only collect a return on its investment in the event of a successful outcome. If the case is lost, the loss is Augusta’s alone. This framework provides clients with an effective risk management solution that removes the cost burden of pursuing a case.
Augusta is flexible in structuring funding arrangements to meet the specific commercial and strategic needs of clients and law firms. In addition to funding for single cases, examples of available funding structures include:
In addition to traditional funding for individual clients, Augusta is increasingly providing finance directly to law firms. These facilities are structured to enable law firms to draw on funding to underwrite their operating costs, while acting for their clients on a contingency basis. The funding to the firm is still characterised as “non-recourse” as the finance is repaid by the firm from the proceeds of the firm’s realised contingent work. The client simply retains their share of the proceeds based on the terms of their contingency arrangement with the firm.
Depending on the terms of the facility, the law firm will retain a material share of the contingent proceeds upon success, which provides potential for significant upside to the firm while protecting against cashflow pressure and downside risk in the event the case is unsuccessful. In addition to the potential financial return to the firms, balancing risk through a facility can provide law firms with the strategic opportunity to satisfy client demand and grow their practice by acting on a contingency basis.
Under a portfolio arrangement, Augusta pays the cost of conducting multiple cases through a single facility. This model creates an efficient solution for clients seeking to pursue a number of claims simultaneously, for example, clients with multiple cases across an entire business or a discrete set of claims relating to a particular project.
The defining feature of a portfolio arrangement is that Augusta’s investment is “cross-collateralised” across all of the cases included in the facility. Unlike a single case investment where the outcome is binary, Augusta’s risk is spread across the outcomes of multiple cases and Augusta is repaid from the cases that resolve successfully. This dynamic can substantially lower the risk profile of Augusta’s investment which, most relevantly from the client’s perspective, should result in a lower success fee than funding on a single case basis.
In addition to enhancing flexibility in relation to the commercial terms of funding, depending on the size and composition of the portfolio, cross-collateralisation also allows Augusta and clients to consider options to streamline the standard of diligence required for a case to be approved for investment.
The emergence of portfolio funding has allowed Augusta to efficiently cater to the commercial needs of sophisticated clients by providing a more strategic “business-wide” solution to their litigation expenditure. Consistent with this commercial approach, depending on the preference of the client, Augusta may also consider including in the facility an amount of working capital finance to be used to support the business of the claimant.
Who Do We Fund?
Whether you are a lawyer, business or individual we may be able to help with funding for your case.
