The secondary market in litigation finance is moving from theoretical to live. In April 2025, Omni Bridgeway completed a landmark A$320m — roughly £160 million — secondary transaction with Ares Management — structured as a continuation fund across more than 150 legal assets. Clifford Chance, who advised on the deal, described it as the first continuation fund in the legal finance industry. Portfolio stakes, single-asset trades, LP position transfers. Capital is moving.
What isn't moving is the operational infrastructure most funders have built to support it.
When a secondary buyer conducts diligence on a litigation portfolio, they are not reviewing a pitch deck. They want structured, evidenced data at the asset level: case status, mandate compliance history, counsel performance records, limitation exposure, funding drawdowns and litigation timelines — across every funded matter in scope.
Most funders cannot produce that. Not because the data doesn't exist, but because it was never structured to be extracted.
Why the secondary market in litigation finance is accelerating now
Several pressures are converging. LP liquidity cycles are shortening. Fund vintages are maturing. Large funders are running structured sale processes to recycle capital. Institutional buyers — family offices, alternative asset managers, insurers seeking non-correlated returns — are actively entering the space.
The Ares/Omni Bridgeway deal was not an isolated event. It was a signal. The question for every funder is whether, when approached, they can respond to a structured data request within days rather than weeks.
What Fenchurch Legal and SSB Law actually revealed
The administration of Fenchurch Legal and the systemic failures at SSB Law were different events, with different causes. But they point to the same underlying gap.
In both cases, funders had capital deployed across firms they could not see inside in real time. Compliance was assumed, not evidenced. Mandate breaches were identified after the fact. Exposure crystallised with no warning and, by then, limited recovery options.
These are not one-off failures. They are previews of what happens when operational infrastructure doesn't keep pace with capital deployment.
A secondary buyer conducting diligence on a portfolio will find exactly that gap — and price it accordingly.
What a secondary buyer actually asks for
Diligence on a litigation portfolio goes beyond case status summaries. Buyers want to understand the structural integrity of the portfolio — whether each funded matter is operating inside its original mandate, whether there are limitation risks, whether the law firm relationship is operating within the terms of the funding agreement.
They also want to understand the evidence trail. Has the funder been conducting regular operational oversight? Are audit records structured and retrievable? Are the key risk signals — case delays, cost overruns, counsel changes — documented, dated, and accessible?
Funders who have maintained structured oversight throughout the portfolio's life can answer those questions quickly. Those who have relied on informal reporting, email chains and quarterly calls cannot.
The documentation gap
The documentation gap in litigation finance is significant — and not widely discussed. Funding agreements typically require law firms to report on case progress, costs and material developments. In practice, enforcement is inconsistent. Reporting arrives late, in non-standard formats, rarely reconciled against the original mandate terms.
The result is a portfolio where the funder has a general sense of how cases are progressing — but lacks the structured, timestamped evidence pack that a secondary buyer, an LP, or an investment committee needs to assess it with confidence.
This gap becomes acutely visible at the moment of a secondary transaction. By then, it is too late to close it quickly.
What "diligence-ready" looks like in practice
A diligence-ready portfolio is not one where everything has gone smoothly. It is one where the oversight record is complete, structured and exportable — regardless of what that record shows.
Secondary buyers understand that litigation is uncertain. They are not expecting a clean portfolio. They are expecting a documented one. Evidence of active mandate oversight, structured audit trails and flagged exceptions tells a buyer that the funder has been running the portfolio operationally — not just financially.
A portfolio with a complete, structured evidence trail commands better terms than one where the diligence process requires weeks of document assembly. That difference shows up in the price.
The moment to build this infrastructure is not when a buyer appears
The funders best positioned for secondary market transactions are those who have built operational infrastructure around structured data from the outset: mandate compliance recorded at the case level, audit findings versioned and retrievable, diligence packs that can be generated on demand rather than assembled under pressure.
The funders who haven't built that infrastructure will spend the early weeks of any diligence process assembling documents that should have been a button. Post-PACCAR governance expectations and the institutional shift toward structured portfolio governance mean the cost of that delay compounds over time.
Lexivoa Mandate
See how Lexivoa Mandate structures portfolio oversight
Lexivoa Mandate provides real-time mandate compliance monitoring, structured audit trails and on-demand diligence pack generation — so when a secondary buyer comes to the table, the evidence is already there.
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