Burford Capital Limited (NYSE:BUR) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And now there’s like e-mails all the time. Like it was — so it’s that sort of feeling in the business that we were trying to convey in some sort of numerical way. And so, we came upon the — because before I’ve been using just the aggregate court statistics, backlog, statistics, and so on. The problem with those is that they don’t really capture accurately necessarily what’s going on with complex cases. So, we came up with this concept of milestone factors just to try to convey to you the velocity, but I want to be clear that I don’t think it’s a financial metric. So, I don’t think that people should be all of a sudden trying to tie these milestone factors to other numbers in the business, and I don’t intend to continue to provide them. We just did them as a way and the reason that we didn’t disclose this 50 or 60 or whatever the number is for the rest of the year, is it’s not something that we track.

It’s not a KPI that I look at on a weekly basis. We just used it as a proxy because I think it was difficult for us to get all of you as investors to understand the dynamics of what was going on in the card system without having you actually be sitting inside the business. So that’s where these came from, but don’t think of them as something that you take to the analytical grail now.

Operator: [Operator Instructions]. Our next question comes from Julian Roberts of Jefferies. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Julian Roberts : Thanks, very much. And James asked a few of mine. And I might just be putting one of his another way, so apologies if the as this is just now. But can you split the gain on the YPF assets between the time value of money effect and litigation risk reduction? And then I’ve got another couple which are presumably what’s left in the due from settlement line is very largely what was there at the start of the year? And do we still expect quite a lot of that to be collected in the balance of 2023? And is it, can you give us, maybe it’s in the — in what you’ve released already. Can you tell us or give us an idea of how much of what has been realized so far this year has been a settlement versus results of adjudication? And that’s all I had. Thanks.

Christopher Bogart: Sure. Let me take a whack at them and then Jon and Jordan can fill in if I go astray. So first of all, the — do from settlement question. Let me comment on this for just a second because it’s slightly unusual for us. So historically, the way this business has worked is that you get to the end of a case. And in most cases, you immediately get paid. Settlements almost always pay right at the time you conclude the settlement. And if you have won a case against a — and the appeals are over against the creditworthy dependent, they’re going to pay the judgment because otherwise, you can go and start pretty easily taking their assets. So that represents the considerable majority of our business. There are obviously exceptions to that, as you’ve seen in the past.