This week, we speak with Eva Shang, co-founder, general partner, and chief executive officer of Legalist, an institutional alternative asset management firm. She leads the company’s 35-person team of engineers, attorneys, and analysts, and is a member of the firm’s valuation and investment committees. Before co-founding Legalist at 20, Eva studied economics at Harvard College.
The firm began in a computer science class at Harvard, data scraping the Massachusetts state court record website. The intention was to pull the site info to see what they might be able to do with it. Shang and her co-founder, Christian Haigh, began doing legal analytics as a project. That led to a stint at Y-Combinator, where the general counsel warned them of problems in their model of selling data to lawyers. He urged them to look into litigation financing.
She explains how they managed through their first legal defeat, which made them question their model. But their litigation finance success rate is fairly high, and their returns have been solid. They also fund two other strategies, Debtor-in-Possession financing, and government accounts receivables financing.
A list of her favorite books is here; A transcript of our conversation is available here Tuesday.
You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Dr. Brian Klaas, Associate Professor in Global Politics at University College London, and a contributing writer for The Atlantic, and the author of numerous books on global politics. His new book is “Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters.”
Eva Shang’s Favorite Books
