Burford Capital Limited (NYSE:BUR)(LSE:BUR), the leading global finance and asset management firm focused on law, today announces that it has raised a new $360 million private investment fund, the Burford Advantage Master Fund LP ("Advantage Fund").
The Advantage Fund focuses on lower risk, lower return pre-settlement litigation investments than we include in our core legal finance portfolio, targeting matters expected to produce returns in the 12-20% IRR range. The Advantage Fund fills the gap between the Burford Alternative Income Fund, which focuses on lower return post-settlement investments, and Burford's core business.
The Advantage Fund has a structure that rewards Burford more than traditional fund models for producing good performance: the fund does not have a traditional management and performance fee structure, but instead provides the first 10% of annual simple returns to the fund investors while Burford retains any excess return. Based on our internal modeling, Burford does better with this approach than a traditional "2 and 20" fee structure once its returns exceed approximately 13%. (If the fund produces super-normal returns for this level of risk, which is not expected, a level of sharing with fund investors would kick in.)