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

Sometimes those exceptions are when our client has agreed to a structured settlement with payments being made over time. And we’ve had those occur from time to time, but those have always been successful for us because the reality is your leverage is greatest when you’re entering into the settlement. And so, you’re not going to take the structured settlements unless you’re confident in that is going to be paid. And then we’ve had the occasional settlement where noncash assets have come into the mix, and we’ve had to turn them into cash as was the case in, for example, some years ago, a big case that we won in Arizona over some real estate. So, what you generally see when there’s a receivable is those receivables turn over pretty quickly because they’re usually just timing based.

Something settles towards the end of a period, and it doesn’t get paid until into the next period. And we’ve got a pretty long history of most of those receivables being collected rapidly and all of the receivables, except one tiny one when the guy died being collected ultimately. I don’t have any anxiety about collectibility of the current receivables, but there is one item in the due for settlement that is basically being held up for payment because of some collateral litigation that doesn’t really relate to our piece of the litigation. And we are basically in the hands of the court about the speed of the court resolving the other collateral matter. So, I — we’re at the point in that where I certainly have a considerable degree of optimism that, that will get paid this year, but not a certainty because we’re in the hands of the court process just for that one chunky piece of that receivable, which is — which represents about $37 million of the receivable balance.

The rest of it just rolls forward on a consolidated basis. So that’s due from settlement. Your question about can we split time value of money and litigation risk reduction. Can we, yes, will we know? For the reason that Jordan gave earlier, we just don’t think that there’s a level of detail that is probably appropriate for the valuation process. And what was realized, I believe, and you can check this — looking at that table on Page 48 that I just inverted to, of the realized proceeds a fair chunk of it was from the 2019 vintage, $46 million of realizations. And that was how do I best describe it. I think I’d probably describe it as a hybrid of adjudication and resolution. So, it was not a pretrial settlement in the sense of some traditional litigation goes along, gets close to trial, and that is the impetus for the parties to settle.

There was an element of adjudication here and that led to the resolution.

Jordan Licht: And then, Chris, just a clarification. The $37 million was actually group-wide Burford only on the — do from settlement was $23 million with respect to the example that you described. And yes, we feel good about collecting the rest.

Christopher Bogart: We feel good about collecting that, too. We’re just not in control of the timing of it.

Julian Roberts : Yes. Understood. Understood. And just one minor follow-on. So, the one where you said that it’s partly sort of a hybrid of settlements in adjudication. Could it possibly be that maybe there’s a family of cases and there’s been a bit of price discovery because one of them has been adjudicated and other things are kind of following sees that the kind of thing that might have happened or…

Christopher Bogart: No. It’s more the — Jon, did you want to chime in there?