IN CONVERSATION WITH RUTH STACKPOOL-MOORE 15
S APNA Lawyers sometimes assume corporate clients want them to be as lean as possible with fee estimates. However, the trend is that clients are saying ‘don’t giveme a bare bones fee estimate with lots of caveats saying that it doesn’t include this or that contingency. Giveme a realistic budget and err on themore generous side rather than the leaner side’. I guess it is the same for you. RUTH Our interest in that respect is exactly the same as the Claimant’s as we step into their shoes in terms of payment. The ratio of the budget versus the claimvalue is a keymetric for us in determining whether a case is a good investment. S APNA Yes. RUTH People are often surprised that we don’t want the lowest budget possible. We recognise that to have good people working on these cases you need to pay a decent amount of money. We don’t want to pay for inefficiencies, or extrawork that is not necessary, but we have no problemwith paying for goodwork. Firms will come to us with their expected budget andwe will say ‘what about this, what about that. You should make it a bit more’ tomake sure we have a real reflection of the likely costs. S APNA When you’re deciding to take a case on at the beginning, do you outsource any of your decisionmaking, either on the investment side or the legal side? RUTH We do rely on others to provide us with relevant information but we don’t outsource any of the decisionmaking. Whenwe initially receive an enquirymyself, or one of our investment teammembers, will make an initial assessment to determine whether the case is one that we should be looking into. If it is, we will enter into a non-disclosure agreement with the claimant so that we can receive documents relating to the case. If it still looks like a good proposition after reading the documents, we will present it to the investment committee. So in all circumstances both the investment teammember and investment committee has to be satisfied that a case is a good investment if we are to enter into a funding agreement.
S APNA And are you engaged in any portfolio relationships with law firms or clients? RUTH We don’t currently have any portfolio arrangements with firms. I don’t know if we’ve been asked to look at that before. I certainly haven’t in the short time that the office in Hong Kong has been open. At Harbour, we are quite open- minded andwill look at most opportunities to see if there is something that we can do, but I’mnot sure whether we would enter into a portfolio arrangement with a firm. We have tomake it work froman economic point of view, for our investors. We are also looking at funding a portfolio of claims for companies, and one development we have seen recently is banks coming to us with a portfolio of claims for us to look at. S APNA Have you ever funded a Respondent? If so, how does it work? RUTH We generally don’t fund respondents unless there is amonetary counter claim, but I know others do. We are currently thinking about howwe couldmake it work. S APNA Theremust be away, but it’s not as straight forward as funding a Claimant. RUTH You’re right, it’s not straight forward. When someone is facing a claimagainst them it is harder to define success. When the claim is inmotion a Respondent may be verywilling to sign up to our terms, but if it is successfully defeated, there is nothing coming in for us to take our portion fromand the party may try to re-negotiate what we are actually are entitled to. However, as I mentioned, we can fund a counterclaim for a Respondent if we think it is viable. I am involved in a situation like that at themoment.
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