Rene Perras | 00:05
Hello and welcome everyone to Aventura, Florida. I’m Rene Perras. I’m a legal news reporter with Coffee with Q. I’m here today at the Florida Justice Convention annual convention. Airing another edition of The Legal News Professional. Today’s guest will be Brian Spira. A pioneer in litigation finance, He works with the Oxbridge Financial Group, and Brian has been helping attorneys for the last 25 years. Welcome, Brian. Glad you’re here and you were able to come on the show to answer a few questions about yourself. And your particular expertise in the business of law.
Brian Spira | 00:46
Thanks for having me.
Rene Perras | 00:48
Okay, we got a couple questions today, and I’m looking forward to your answers. I guess the first one is, as a founding member of the Oxbridge Financial Group, you have an impressive record of projects helping law firms and plaintiffs with their funding needs. Operationally, developing strategic partnerships, And you’ve been involved doing this for the last 30 years. As a legal service professional, tell us what’s changed over time.
Brian Spira | 01:18
Well, other than that I started, I had brown hair and now I have gray. I think there are two trends that have changed over the last 30 years. The first is litigation funding, and the second one is technology. And I’d like to unpack it a little if I could. Litigation funding, when it started in 1995, It was sketchy. It was like payday loans are looked at right now.
In fact, when we were first approached to help a litigation funder get financing, we had to go to five New York law firms until we found someone that would write us a legal opinion that it was even lawful to do litigation funding. At the time, there were issues of champerty, maintenance, and other things. And what we had to do with our client was really set parameters and take it beyond the scope of payday or loan shark loans, which was looked at. And over a period of five years, it started to be more structured. There was an association of legal funders, and then funders from overseas came in. And by the time 2004, 2005 arrived, not only were we managing a $250 million portfolio of loans to law firms, The Rand Corporation and the Civil Justice Society started dedicating time to talk about litigation funding, and by the time 2010, 2011, even AMLA 200, Companies that were thumbing their nose at it were getting involved.
Today, there is more litigation funding than ever in every kind of Stripe, in every kind of situation. And that change in funding, first of all, provided a lot of money into the system, which has its advantages and disadvantages. Second trend is to do with technology. In 1995, If you were a national law firm, that means you had offices in the 12 largest metropolitan centers. You had support staff. You had to be a national law firm. Otherwise, you were just a local law firm that referred cases out to a national law firm.
But with technology, boutiques started growing up and that you could have the ability of providing full services, even from a small office. You could be on a beach in the Bahamas and run a law firm.
So, that democratized along with funding allowed even a smaller shop to be a national firm. But technology added a challenge to that. And that challenge was that as technology and data exploded, the costs of discovery and the breadth of discovery exploded. It wasn’t just banker’s boxes anymore. It was consulting how to maintain your records, how to get records, where to store this information, reviewing millions upon millions of gigabytes of data. And that presents a challenge today to the 21st century lawyer that didn’t exist. 30 years ago.
Rene Perras | 04:24
Very interesting. What drew you to helping law firms become more effective and efficient? And their practice of law. Was there a pivotal moment in your life that led you to this?
Brian Spira | 04:38
That’s a great question. I’m not sure that there was one pivotal moment. But I think it came over time with many little moments. I think when we started with litigation finance, we believed that the primary obstacle facing plaintiffs of firms was money. But the defense was well-funded.
The plaintiffs only got paid if they succeeded in their cases, and the law firms only got paid if they succeeded in their cases. The biggest barrier to success was money. But then we realized as money started coming in to the industry and we were supplying part of that money we realized that money was not enough. Meaning law firm’s weren’t the greatest business people. That’s why they went to law school. They’re fundamentally gifted in arguments, but not great at budget management. And we started to see that as a lender, you can’t tell someone how to manage their business because you’re giving them money, but you could see where there were problems.
I think the efficiency really came home for me when we were funding a consortium of lawyers in a big mass action in Texas. And they took us into the data room that was busy a few weeks before the big first trial. And they opened the door and I see banker’s boxes. Bankers box after bankers box and attorneys pulling things out, highlighting with a highlighter. Some of the bankers boxes smelled smoky because they were saved from being burnt. And I just thought to myself, what in the 21st century? And why are we still doing it this way? Now, it’s true that in a couple of years, everything became digital, but I realized that there’s a difference between having enough money to litigate and being efficient with those resources to litigate.
Rene Perras | 06:38
Sounds like an interesting first look at these bankers boxes that were set to be put on fire. I’m thinking about, you talked about technology. How do the support services that exist today that you offer, help make law firms or give them the ability to become more efficient?
Brian Spira | 07:00
I think these services are essential to not just to make them more efficient, but they make them more strategic. Law firms I’ve always felt that the biggest way to win their case is to focus on the
strategy of the case. You’ve heard this from dozens of legal professionals. And there’s strategies involved with case acquisition. Money helps with that, what kind of cases you get, what’s the story that you want to tell about your case. People spend money on depo prep, and rightfully so, and they spend money on jury focus groups to figure out what’s the narrative, what’s the story, because at the end of the day, people like stories, and everyone’s focused for them as a strategy, and the way that they’ve looked traditionally at litigation support services, particularly e-discovery, has, this is just a necessary way of getting from point A to point B. It’s sort of like Is it really strategic to get a Dell laptop versus an Apple MacBook? Not really, right?
Very few people see a strategic difference. The reality is that e-discovery is strategic differentiator. Firstly, the defense is forcing that to be a strategic differentiator because they’re using e-discovery as a bludgeon. On the plaintiffs. They are even purposely negotiating to withhold the production of data. Or alternatively, or in conjunction with that, dumping millions of pages of useless data on them. Drowning the Needle in the Haystack.
So now you have to figure out Not just getting through it, how do I best get through it? And it starts when you negotiate what you’re going to get. Not two different cases don’t have the same discovery needs, and you need to focus on that. And then you’ve got to focus on what’s the platform that’s going to work for me and my team and my staff, and what kind of staff do I need for the team? How am I going to use technology? How am I going to use it efficiently? What kind of service providers am I going to bring on board on an ad hoc basis to do this? How am I going to structure and review? How am I going to use artificial intelligence in enabling me to get through more documents? More quickly at a lower cost. That’s strategic.
Rene Perras | 09:23
Makes a lot of sense. If we could help position you as the thought leader in the legal community, where could you make your biggest impact? Would it be in educating law firms? And what would that be? Or something else.
Brian Spira | 09:42
It goes all about education. I’m a big believer in whatever I’ve done, but an educated customer is the best customer. One of the problems that we have is that Law firms think of e-discovery, someone else is going to do it, and we have an easy button and don’t worry. Just press a button and it’ll get that. And what I’d like to be able to do more is educate them on the timeline of cases that the best efficient use of e-discovery vendors and providers is by mapping out the discovery just like you do when you have deadlines on a case.
Because what happens is, all of a sudden you realize at the last minute you have my God, 100,000 documents I just presented with. It always costs more if you have to do things at the last minute. And therefore, planning is just so essential. And the thing I’d like to do is educate them, not just on being seduced by the lowest price per gigabyte, but understanding what’s really behind it. What else are they going to need? Is this going to work for your firm? There’s no two solutions work. For the same firm. And therefore educate them what they need, how they work, and provide something that’s tailored for them. And that helps them improve as litigators and helps them improve the timeline for the cases. And it will help them sleep better at night.
Rene Perras | 11:12
That makes a lot of sense. Five years from now. How do you want to be known in the legal community? What legacy are you hoping to be building?
Brian Spira | 11:23
I’m 56 years old, so it’s kind of hard to think of legacy but In the small, niche places In the litigation universe that I It habit. I’d like to be known as someone that helped plaintiffs and their attorneys achieve a small measure of justice. More quickly and more efficiently.
I’ll give an example. The opioid litigation is one of the most significant litigations that have occurred in this country since the big tobacco settlement in 1998. And when we got involved, the plaintiff consortium was being drowned by documents. Not the documents that the defense had to produce. That was difficult enough. But by their own documents, their own electronic information, all the state attorney generals, and they didn’t know how to do that in a timely fashion, and they were being sanctioned, and the defense was really pushing them into a hard place. And by designing the rubric of how to conduct the review and scaffolding the different teams, we were able to make an unmanageable process manageable. And that, I’d like to believe, sped things up.
Rene Perras | 12:47
How does a consumer directly benefit from some of the things that you do.
Brian Spira | 12:55
Being the consumer benefits from what the Trial Lawyer Association or the American Association for Justice or any plaintiff attorney does. Because corporations, while they do a lot of good, even the corporations such as Johnson & Johnson, who without life-saving medications, the average lifespan in this country would be much lower. While they do a good job… Unfortunately, Things happen.
Sometimes they do things that they don’t. Reveal, sometimes they do things that are inappropriate, and the fact that there’s a trial lobby makes the world safer. Real change happens because the trial lobby gets involved. There would be no Mandatory seatbelt law? If it wasn’t for the trial law. And it is a much safer world when everyone’s wearing a seatbelt.
Rene Perras | 13:53
The trial bar. Are the guardians of our public safety.
Brian Spira | 13:59
I would say they’re the guardrails of capitalism. Capitalism is an incredible thing. Unfortunately, capitalism, values profits over pretty much everything. And while government can help to a certain extent. We live in a world where the government is pretty hands-off, except in certain places. Situations And there’s laws and it’s up to the legal system. To make sure that corporations follow the law. And the plaintiff bar are agents for change. They’ve been agents to change for. 50 years, and they hopefully will continue to be agents for change for the next 50 years.
Rene Perras | 14:42
This has been an enlightening session of the Legal News Professional. Brian for coming on the show. Sharing your time and your expertise, I think the audience will greatly benefit from it. I’m Rene Perrault. Legal News Reporter with Coffee with Q. Tune in. And our next show, when another elite lawyer or legal professional… We’ll discuss and educate us on some new legal trends of the day.