NLJ PROFILE: Neil Purslow, Therium

What was your route into the profession?

I grew up on the South Coast, and the father of a primary school friend was the local solicitor and his mother a barrister. From them I thought that becoming a lawyer would be a good idea, so I read law and went straight into it from Oxford. Because I was interested in family law, and frankly knowing little about the City at that stage, I went to Withers to become a family lawyer but found out that I loved commercial litigation and so moved into that. I was a restless private practice lawyer though, and when I saw the opportunity to fund litigation rather than practise, I never looked back.

What has been your biggest career challenge so far?

No doubt it was launching Therium. When we were fundraising in 2009, we were two lawyers with no experience in managing money, in an asset class which was unknown (and which many lawyers still thought was illegal) and in the teeth of a global financial crisis when investors were terrified of risk—not an easy pitch! Our first fund was £2.4m, the second £3.3m, then £4.3m and on from there as we built the funds up. In retrospect, although I would never have chosen it, this was a great discipline and we never had the chance to make the expensive mistakes which have put others out of business. This year, just around our tenth anniversary, we cleared the $1bn mark, but that discipline of constantly trying to make the right decision and building for the long term is still there.   

Which person within the legal profession inspires you most?

If it is not cheating to have 11, right now it has to be Baroness Hale and the 11 justices of the Supreme Court for their decision on the prorogation of Parliament which protected the delicate balance between the institutions of government. That decision typifies the flexibility and independence of our judicial system, which allowed it to deliver the right result in the face of huge pressure. Not all decisions of course live up to that ambition, but this one made me proud to be a lawyer.

If you weren’t a lawyer, what would you choose as an alternate career?

These days I don’t give legal advice to clients and as a funder I think I have already chosen that alternative career; sometimes after meetings people will ask if I have a finance background and I take that as a compliment and an indicator of how far we have come since 2009. That said, I still have the values of a lawyer—the importance of values and ethics, the belief that the profession exists to serve the clients, and a faith in our legal system and the rule of law. We may now only provide financing, but those values are still core to how we think about what we are doing.

Who is your favourite fictional lawyer?

‘Favourite’ may stretch it but Chuck Rhoades Jr in the early seasons of Billions makes for great viewing in his tussle with Bobby Axelrod—but he isn’t much of a role model on the ethics front, or in fact any front.  

What change would you make to the profession?

I actually think there is a lot to like about the legal profession—my experience is that individual lawyers typically work immensely hard to do the best they can for their clients and standards of ethics and professionalism are generally very high. However, the business model of the profession (and particularly the structures through which lawyers work and the billing model) limits the situations in which lawyers can help clients, and legal aid cuts in recent years have made that dramatically worse. We have seen litigation finance help lawyers provide services in a broader cross-section of cases—whether it is through providing lending to individual clients on divorce, funding large scale group and class actions and international arbitrations or providing pro bono funding to cases and projects—and I believe that the availability of external capital to the profession will help to fuel innovation in business models to continue that trend.

How do you relax?

I don’t know about relaxing but, away from Therium, I have recently joined the board of Level, a lending boutique that provides family litigation finance. Family law has been a long-standing interest and Level provides the same kind of bespoke and personal service that the firms that it works with do. The potential to work with them as they build on that approach was too interesting to pass up. And then there is always the next season of Billions…

Neil Purslow is the co-founder of litigation funder Therium, and a non-executive director of family litigation funding specialist Level