Hello, this is Rob Bailhache, and I'm Head of Investor Relations, EMEA and Asia at Burford Capital. I and the whole team at Burford would like to welcome you to today's 2024 CEO and CFO audio webcast for our retail shareholders around the world. Thanks for your interest, and for many of you, long-standing investments, alongside employee shareholders that today own around 10% of the company. We hope you find this forum useful. Before we start with my handing over to Chris for some critical prepared remarks, I'd like to do some very quick housekeeping.
Once we have concluded the prepared remarks, we will move to Q&A. You can ask a question at any time by typing it into the Q&A box that you can see on your screen. This is discreet to you and us. If you have a technical question for the production team in our virtual green room, you can use the same private Q&A box for that purpose. We'll try to get through as many questions as possible, but due to the fixed time available, we likely won't be able to respond to each of them on this session today.
The selection of the questions we've already received are grouped by topic, and we plan on getting to each topic that's been raised. If there are new subjects from the live Q&A feed, we'll try to get to those as well. And finally, there will be a replay available to registrants a short while after today's event using the webcast registration link you've been provided with. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Chris Bogart, Burford's Chief Executive Officer.
Great. Thanks very much, Rob. And hi, everybody. Thank you for taking some time to chat with us today. As Rob noted, we had a significant number of excellent questions that touch on a wide range of the aspects of the business submitted in advance. And so I'm going to try to use virtually all of the time we have available for Q&A and not spend very much time on a presentation, especially since now that we've gone to quarterly earnings, you hear from us four times a year on investor calls and with slides. And it was only last month that we did our most recent call, and so I don't know that there's any point in repeating the things that we said there. You can certainly go back and listen to that call again.
I will use this slide that's on the screen just to sort of set the table, if you will, about what we call the four pillars of Burford and its value proposition. One of those pillars is obviously the fact that we have a large, significant portfolio of diversified legal assets. That portfolio was more than $7 billion right now. And as we've noted, that continues to experience robust activity as courts try to come back and fully normalize after the lingering effects of the pandemic. And that's a normalization that is occurring at different paces depending on the court system. Some courts are completely back to normal now, whereas others still do have some meaningful backlogs.
And that's caused for us a meaningful level of activity in the business as we work through the many cases that otherwise, if you hadn't had the pandemic, probably would have previously resolved. So as we say here, we're seeing robust activity, and that is keeping us very busy. In addition to the value that that portfolio is expected to throw off over the years to come, we also have a strong origination platform that enables us to write a significant amount of new business every year. We are by far the market leader in terms of the scale and scope of the business that we undertake.
We have people all over the world and an excellent team of people that does high-value, complex litigation and arbitration matters for corporates and for large law firms really anywhere they present themselves. We are a large asset manager in addition to investing from the balance sheet. And on top of all that, we have a significant judgment pending in the YPF cases, a $16 billion judgment that we received in the fall of last year.
That judgment continues to move its way through the judicial and, frankly, political processes. There's an appeal pending in the U.S. of the judgment, and there's also enforcement activity going on in multiple jurisdictions, given that the judgment is today fully enforceable. That's what we think of as the Burford value proposition. Really, what we've done in our 15 years in existence is we've built a mousetrap that really works. What I mean by that is that when we get quality matters in the door, we are very good at diligencing those matters, at understanding them, at creating financing transactions around them. We've done that with respect to technical capital you can see here.
And then one of the things that makes this business both attractive to you as investors, but also frustrating to you as investors, is the fact that once we embark on one of these litigation investments, the litigation process then takes over. And the reason that's attractive is because that process is entirely uncorrelated to market conditions or economic activity. It has its own life cycle. It has its own pace, and it has its own rules. And those vary by jurisdiction, but they share the common theme that our investments move along a process.
They ultimately come to the end of that process. We don't need a functioning market to generate an investment exit, unlike private equity or venture capital. The exit simply literally plops out of the litigation process, and that is our investment return. So that is, as I said, an entirely uncorrelated process.
We have any number of investors who have made investments in Burford, literally earmarking Burford as an allocation to an uncorrelated bucket. On the other hand, the frustrating part for you and for us as a management team is that that lack of correlation translates also into a lack of predictability about timing. That is simply the nature of the beast. I know that investors would love us to be able to say with great precision, "Here's what we think is going to happen next quarter," or, "Here's what we think is going to happen next year." But it's just not within our gift to be able to do that on any sort of responsible and reliable basis. What we can do instead, and what we do do, is we give you data like this.
This data now is across a very substantial volume of activity, as you see on the right-hand side, covering not quite $3 billion of cash realizations. All of the numbers on this page, by the way, are cash numbers. There's no accounting dynamic in these numbers. So what you can see is that we have an extensive track record of producing the kinds of results that you see in the center of the page, the three possible outcomes of pieces of litigation. They either go to trial and win, or they go to trial and lose, or they settle.
As you can see, almost three-quarters of them settle. Settlement is very pleasant because it tends to happen somewhat faster, and it eliminates the litigation risk associated with the investment. We're not taking the case to trial anymore. We're settling it and getting paid instead. There's obviously a price associated with that de-risking. And that means that nobody settles claims for their full value. They settle claims for a discounted value. And so settlements happen faster. They're riskless, but they also are somewhat lower returning than if we go to trial and win. And as you can see, our loss levels are really quite low, given the idiosyncratic risk of these assets.
And we have brought those loss levels down over time for a variety of reasons, including our experience in the asset class, but also the increasing use of data science in our investment process. We have a significant competitive advantage by having a very significant portion of proprietary data that we use in our investment process. And as you can see, we're down to about an 8% loss rate there. And what all that does is translate into outcomes that look like this.
The other very nice thing about this is the degree of asymmetry that exists across these investments. In other words, when we lose, our losses are cabined at the level of capital that we have invested. Whereas if we win, the red on the right-hand side, we can win multiples of that level of capital. And of course, the middle ground there tends to be the settlements that make up the difference. So it's a business that we've shown over time that we can do in a high-quality, repeatable way. And that, I think, is what should give investors quite a good deal of comfort now that we've been doing this for 15 years and have been producing desirable results across that period. So that takes us really to your questions.
And your questions actually explore a number of the points on this page, the fact that we're the global leader here, the quality and asymmetry of those uncorrelated returns, the fact that we enjoy a significant competitive advantage for a number of reasons in the business. We come with strong diversification, and we have demonstrated a long history of proven capital and liquidity management. And with that, why don't we take our questions?
Thanks, Chris. Our first question comes from Bruce Anderson. Burford's 2022 business review highlighted that the expected realized gains from definitive commitments made in 2021 and 2022 were $750 million and $900 million, respectively. Given that non-YPF realized and unrealized gains in FY23 were only $345 million, this would suggest that non-YPF realized gains may well be substantially higher over the next couple of years than they were last year. Do you agree and that the best is yet to come?
I always think the best is yet to come. Let me tell you why for a couple of reasons. You've heard John Molot on prior calls talk about his enthusiasm for the portfolio that we have constructed. One of the reasons for that is that when you look at the periods that Bruce has called out in his question, those are, in litigation terms, relatively recent periods, 2021 and 2022. That's doubly so because we've got the pandemic intervening there. I would not expect, in normal course, for us to be seeing only in the middle of 2024. I would not expect us to be seeing the bulk of the portfolio activity associated with the investments that we made during that time period. That's why I'm happy to agree that I think the best probably is yet to come.
I would, as a footnote, just say that we have stopped, unfortunately, providing the outputs of our probabilistic modeling. And we've stopped doing that for some arcane securities and accounting reasons in that the modeling does not comport with GAAP and IFRS. It was never intended to, obviously. But that makes the people who fuss over the financial statements unhappy about the idea that we're introducing a different kind of measurement. And so we are actually at work on looking for effectively a replacement way so that we can talk to you about the business without getting into that dilemma. Because we still do use internally in the business that probabilistic modeling extensively. But it's not something at the moment that we are permitted to make public.
I would just like to underline, though, a point that we made at our last Investor Day when we rolled out the Probabilistic Modeling publicly, which is that it is just that. It is probabilistic modeling. And so what that means is that it's taking a wide range of possible outcomes, assigning weights to them, and producing a single number that reflects that weighted outcome. What you can be sure of is that it won't be entirely accurate.
In other words, just as a random example, if the three possible outcomes are win, lose, and settle, and we do this in a much more sophisticated way, but if you just come along and say, "Well, we're going to assign a 10% possibility of loss, a 50% possibility of settlement, and a 40% possibility of winning," all we know for sure is that only one of those things is going to be possible, and they will occur at 100%. And so whatever number we assign to each of those weights is not actually going to be the ultimate outcome of the matter. But we nevertheless find it to be a very valuable tool.
Going back to Bruce's question, I do believe because of the quality of the assets in the portfolio across numerous vintages, including the vintages that have been delayed by COVID, we do believe that there is real value there, as we said when we talked about the four pillars.
Thanks, Chris. The next question is from Martin Devine and Ed Sawn-Grow. How does the current level of identified or introduced opportunities compare with pre-pandemic conditions in terms of number and scale?
I don't think that the pandemic made a particularly large difference. In other words, I think the business was on a trajectory of what was happening with respect to new business. And I don't think that trajectory, other than being interrupted by the pandemic, I don't think the pandemic caused any change to the trajectory. And that trajectory is sort of wrapped up in sort of a fundamental element of what's happening in the business generally. When we started this business, we were doing what I often call litigation finance 101. In other words, we had a fairly simple product offering where we were advancing capital to clients to pay their legal fees.
And we were doing so in exchange for a share of the recoveries that we would receive. We still do that today. That's a meaningful part of our business. It's a good and nicely profitable business. But the limitation that it comes with, of course, is that our investments would not ever be larger than the amount of legal fees that the case actually needed. And so what has happened over time is that we have added some other features of the capital that we can provide to clients. We have done any number of multi-case portfolios, and we also today monetize some of the expected future value associated with litigation and arbitration matters. And that evolution has changed both the average deal size that we do. It's become larger, and we've consciously started to exclude smaller deals.
And it has also changed the mix of business to some extent in that in the litigation finance 101 context, we were largely, even though our contractual counterparty might have been the client, we were largely dealing with the law firm because the law firm was highly motivated to get itself hired and get its fees paid. Whereas today, we also have meaningful engagement with corporate clients directly because the monetization element of what we do is of interest to them and of less interest to law firms. Law firms don't get any benefit out of the fact that we do a monetization deal with one of their clients. And so that results in, if you will, a larger market than when we were just doing the litigation finance 101 deals. And that's been an exciting area for our growth.
A further question on growth from Bruce Anderson. A recent litigation finance broker report stated that industry new commitments of $2.7 billion in the 12 months to June 2023 were down 15% from $3.2 billion in the prior 12-month period. Burford's new commitments in that 12-month to June 2023 period were $1.1 billion, an increase of 27% over the same prior year period, while Burford's implied market share in 2023 was almost 40%, up from 26% in the prior year in 2022. Shouldn't you make more of Burford's achievements relative to the market as a whole?
I suppose the answer might be yes, except that we tend to prefer a world where we give you data and let you reach your own conclusions from that data as opposed to us evangelizing our wonderfulness from the rooftops. So there is a little bit of an element of style associated with that. And I know that Bruce finds that frustrating from time to time. But given that we, as litigators, see public companies take many stumbles and many missteps, some number of which lead to litigation, I think we probably exist on the more conservative end of the spectrum. I would say, though, in response to the specific question, that I don't know where this data comes from, which is part of the other reason that we don't make any use of it.
Most litigation finance providers are private firms that do not do any sort of reporting. We don't ourselves engage with the broker that does this survey. I have no idea about the quality or reliability of the data that is there, and so I think that because somebody, for advertising reasons, is putting out numbers like this does not, frankly, tell me all that much. That being said, I don't have any reason directionally not to believe that Burford is a very large market participant here, and we see significant market benefits from that position of market leadership and from scale.
Thanks, Chris. The next question is on the topic of underwriting data and analytics, and it comes from Sean Jahan. Can you elaborate on how Burford's proprietary dataset and quantitative modeling provide a competitive advantage? Specifically, how do these tools enhance your ability to underwrite, price, and manage legal finance assets? Since the dataset is growing all the time, have you found its accuracy to be improving?
So I'll comment on this, and then Jordan might chime in as well. But this is something that is very, very significant in our investment process. We began investing in data science half a dozen years ago. We now have a significant team and make meaningful investments in the area so that we can maximize the use of the data that we have. And just to step back and talk about that data for a second, the challenge that you have in complex litigation, and you saw on the slide that I had up a couple of slides ago that we had a 74% settlement rate. Virtually all of those settlements are going to be confidential. They're not going to be publicly available.
And so you don't know, as a litigant, whether you're a client, whether you're a lawyer or a law firm, the data that you have is only the data that relates to your own individual experience. So if I'm a corporate, I know what I have paid in the past to settle some cases. But I don't know what my competitors have paid to settle cases. I don't know what the industry rate, if you will, is. And even lawyers at law firms, in big complicated cases, you only work on a few cases at a time. And so your base of data is just not all that large.
Whereas we have a very significant base of that kind of data, which makes us better able to predict how things are going to resolve. We just have access to a lot of non-public information. And that lets us do all sorts of things. It lets us, when we're underwriting an investment before making it, it lets us apply a lot of that learning and combine it with other data science techniques to really take a hard-nosed view about what we think the economic potential of the case before us is. And that's why you have to always ignore, by the way, sort of the headline numbers that you see in litigation.
Obviously, you're going to put forward the best possible case that you can have for every possible dollar of damages that a creative lawyer can possibly dream up. But that doesn't often correlate at all to what the ultimate outcome is. And so you need to be cautious about those kinds of headline numbers. So what we're able to do is substitute for those headline numbers our pragmatic view of what the litigation actually could produce.
And then, on top of that, we're able to be of assistance to our clients as they're going through the litigation process in terms of being able to counsel them about where cases like this resolve and how to view the various ebbs and flows that you get in any piece of complex litigation when you consider settlement, when you consider various strategies and tactics. So it is a very significant benefit to us. And as the questioner notes, it's a benefit that only keeps on giving because every year we're doing, in round numbers, $1 billion more of this stuff. And to do that means that we need to be looking at lots of new cases every year and gaining yet more data and insight. Jordan, did I leave any room for you?
You did, actually. I think the only other piece that I would add, which wasn't quite directed at the question, but is always worth discussing when talking about the data and analytics, is that we are not lawyers first. We're investment professionals first. And so when you think about the pipeline of activity, when we look to underwrite, it's not good enough to just be right on the law. This is an investment. And so this process begins on day one and operates in parallel with the underwriting of the case. And I think that that is, I think that's unique to us and actually extremely important in the way in which we evaluate the opportunities that. Otherwise, Chris, you got it all.
Thanks, Jordan. The next question comes from Yongku Nan. It's on origination. Around one half of the origination at Burford comes directly from companies rather than law firms. Could you provide insight into the initial process of establishing contact and soliciting potential clients? An actual example would be greatly appreciated.
Sure, so this happens in a number of different ways, and it's going to depend a little bit on whether we're talking about a corporate client that just has a piece of litigation that is unique to it or whether the underlying litigation issue affects multiple companies, so let me give you an example of the latter. Many of you probably know that the European Commission has concluded that there was an illegal price-fixing cartel with respect to the manufacture and sale of diesel trucks. So if you, as a business, are a buyer of diesel trucks, if you operate a fleet of trucks, you're going to have a claim for being overcharged for the trucks that you had purchased over a period of years, and that claim is going to exist for many, many businesses.
But each of those claims is going to be slightly different because you will have bought your trucks from one manufacturer as opposed to another. You will have negotiated whatever particular deal that you were able to negotiate and so on. So there is a commonality to these cases, but there is also a collection of individual factors. And so in a situation like that, we might actually reach out directly to businesses that we think are likely to have purchased meaningful quantities of trucks. And we might work with those businesses to educate them about the state of the law and the potential value of their claim and offer them financing associated with that.
And we might do that for a number of businesses and build a book of such claims to be able to take them forward, including some cost efficiencies and some operating leverage. And so that's sort of one flavor of what happens. Another flavor of what happens, especially when you're dealing with single cases where there's not that kind of industry commonality, is we may get approached directly by the corporate client. We're well-known to lawyers in the industry. We're accessible. And if you're thinking about doing some financing for litigation, it doesn't take you very much Google searching to figure out that we're one of the people you should clearly be talking to.
And so some of our business literally just comes in over the transom without us having established a pre-existing relationship with a client. And then there's sort of everything in between. We spend time going and educating clients individually and at events about what we do and how it helps their business. I was just out in California, for example, speaking at a legal conference focused on the healthcare industry where I was speaking to 100 or 200 general counsel about what they could do to make their legal functions and legal departments more economically efficient and create some financial contribution into the business, so it's sort of all over the lot, but so we use all of what I would call the traditional techniques of B2B financial business development.
There's another question on origination from Sean Jahan. When you take on a new client, in addition to the standard due diligence, do you also assess how much future business may be possible with this said client?
Sure. And that, of course, also is going to determine how we deploy our limited internal resources. So because we don't have any industry specialization, because we like the big law firms, we're prepared to do any kind of case for any kind of client, a client in any industry. It's not we only do technology or we only do healthcare. And so because of that, virtually every business in the world of a certain size is a potential client of ours.
And it's certainly not possible for us to have a business development and sales effort that goes and calls on every business in the world. And so we do a fair amount of work to try to focus on businesses that we think are likely to have a higher potential for having larger and/or repeating types of litigation that would be useful for a long-term relationship with us.
The next question relates to realizations, and it comes from Peter Quinn. After the first quarter update last year, Mr. Molot, John Molot, our Chief Investment Officer, mentioned a record number of cases were in a holding pattern ready to land, and after the second quarter update, Mr. Bogart said that we should ultimately judge success on cash received. Have any of these cases landed, and has the cash been received?
So I think that to answer that question specifically would basically require me to give you non-public information because we haven't yet reported on Q2. But what I can say in a more general context is, and we've said this before, that the portfolio is very active, that we are seeing, and because cases follow this sort of preordained process, that level of activity ultimately leads to the conclusion of cases. It's just a question of how many twists and turns there are along the road to get to that resolution. But you always end up with a resolution, even if it takes quite a long time. And you're seeing that.
I know that sometimes, just to digress for a second, I know that sometimes people look at old assets, and they have sort of a skepticism probably born out of the fact that if you look at a private equity firm and look at really old deals, mostly those deals are in some sort of distress. They can't be sold, and that's why they're still sitting there. That's just not the case in our business. Old assets simply mean that the conveyor belt is either moving more slowly or has more twists and turns along the way than might be the case in some other types of litigation. But in the past 12 months, we've seen and continue to see meaningful resolutions from litigation that we did as long ago as 2010.
So I think you should not think about duration of time as being a judge of anything here. But sort of back to the question, what we can say is we're seeing a lot of portfolio activity. We're seeing what we have described as a supernormal level of portfolio activity because we're seeing the courts effectively try to clear the COVID backlog while also not putting newly filed cases at the back of the queue. And different courts are having different levels of success with doing that. But that is certainly meaning that we're busy in the business.
Yongku Nan has a question on duration of our legal finance assets. The cumulative weighted average life for the concluded portfolio currently stands at 2.4 years based on realizations. With the expected clearance of the COVID-19 backlog, do you anticipate a notable increase in weighted average life? If not, what factors contribute to this expectation?
Well, every time I think that duration or weighted average life is going to extend out, and I have thought that on multiple occasions. Every time I think that, I then get the numbers, and it doesn't. And so why hasn't it? And I think the principal answer to that is the impact of some large and fairly fast settlements or partial resolutions. So if you look, for example, at 2023, we made an investment in June of 2023 of $325 million corporate portfolio into which we deployed $225 million. So when we made that investment, the normal timeframes of litigation would have suggested that that case was going to settle, and it was on a normal track. It would probably settle in 2025.
And if it was going to go to trial, if they were going to go to trial in those cases, it'd probably be even longer than that. And instead, that settled in December, in very late December 2023. And it settled for reasons outside of the litigation context, probably. I've talked publicly before about the dynamic of year-end settlements where companies, if they've had a good year and they have some free cash, they want to go and clean up their litigation portfolio, clean up their balance sheet a little bit. And so that fairly large case only is going to have six months or so of duration from commitment to resolution. And that will offset some considerable number of COVID delays that would otherwise perhaps be dragging that number out.
And so the simple answer is, even though intuitively it might seem like those should continue to push out, we haven't seen the numbers do so dramatically yet.
Thanks, Chris. The next couple of questions are related to our funded matters that are in the public domain. The first question comes from Paul de Gruchy. The Sysco case is well publicized with numerous, often conflicting judgments passed in many U.S. courts. Can you provide an update on how Burford has invested and the best and worst-case scenarios for these cases? Can you also provide some color on which court decisions actually matter?
Sure. So let me start with an overarching point that I really beg you to keep firmly in mind, even though I know that it is almost irresistible to look at cases once they become public. But the simple fact of the matter is that you just do not have enough information about what's actually going on in any piece of litigation, even if it's out there in the public domain. So taking the Sysco cases, these are cases about a sprawling complex set of litigation going on in the United States around four different animal proteins: chicken, beef, turkey, and pork. And the allegations in the cases are that there was effectively an illegal price fixing conspiracy in the supply of those four animal proteins.
And Sysco is one of our clients and has significant claims in those cases, given Sysco's size as a major food distributor. So the challenge is what you do in these sprawling antitrust cases is the game afoot is that if you're a defendant, you're going to try sort of a very large number of tactics to try to narrow and/or derail the case. And if you're a plaintiff, of course, your goal is to get the cases to proceed as rapidly as possible in a straight line towards trial. And so what you see playing out is various strategies around those two overarching goals. But it can be often very difficult to divine exactly what the strategy is and why things are happening and what they actually mean if the only thing that you have are the public filings.
And that's all you have in these cases. And so I have a good deal of sympathy with the questioner when you see conflicting judgments and you don't know quite how to read them and you don't know quite what the economic impact of them is. This is made even harder in antitrust cases because virtually all of the data that would try to help you understand the cases is under a judicial seal. And so you can't even know the raw numbers that would maybe give you a little bit of color about what some of the judicial decisions mean. And so as unsatisfying as this is as an answer, there's really nothing that you can do along the way.
You really just have to, and so do we. We really just have to wait as the conveyor belt continues its journey and wait for one of those three outcomes that I described earlier. Trying to game out things along the way and say, "Oh, well, look, because this judge over here in one of the four cases made this kind of ruling, I think the overall value of the cases has either gone up a lot or gone down a lot." It's very, very difficult to do that.
The second question relating to our funded matters in the public domain comes from Bruce Anderson. Australia's Sundance Resources has disclosed that Burford is funding their $8.8 billion claim against the Republic of the Congo over a revoked mining license, as well as a potential claim against Cameroon. Where is this case currently in the settlement process, and what might the next steps be?
So first of all, this is an example of the point that I was making earlier where both of the points I was making earlier, I guess. One is you really can't draw any conclusions from our appearance in cases like this. And that's doubly true when there are arbitration matters because unlike the Sysco case, where at least you do see some public filings from time to time, in an arbitration proceeding like this, you don't even get that. So there's really nothing you can do as the case is moving through the process to understand where it exists. But the other point that I made earlier that I'd continue to apply here is it's just a perilous undertaking to look at headline claim values.
And we don't do that when we analyze cases, and I would discourage investors from doing that either. But in terms of this particular case, as you can imagine, we're never, ever in a position to be able to talk about settlement activity or settlement process, whether in this case or in YPF or in any of the cases that we do. That's something purely that belongs to the client, and we would never be able to disclose it. So unless the client is disclosing it because it's a public company, we're certainly not in a position of doing anything.
And we're not able to go beyond a client's own disclosures in the relatively unusual instances like this one where the client is a public company and had a disclosure and reporting obligation. That's their obligation, not ours, and we remain barred by our confidentiality restrictions in our agreements from saying anything more than the client does.
The next question is on the functioning of courts and legal processes, and it comes from Martin Devine. In the recent shareholders' A.J. Bell presentation in London, Chris usefully suggested looking at the Burford cases in the portfolio as progressing at various stages along a conveyor on their way to eventual conclusion. During the pandemic, I suspect the conveyor stopped. Coming out of the pandemic, it probably ran inefficiently and was starting and stopping. How is the conveyor running currently?
Well, as you can tell, because I've already used it a couple of times already, I do like the analogy. And I think the questioner is exactly right that the conveyor did stop in many courts. And that is particularly true in the U.S. courts because you simply could not assemble juries for quite a long time during the course of the pandemic. Courts that don't rely on juries as much, so for example, the English Commercial Courts, did not suffer as much during the pandemic because they were more capable of moving their operations online. And you're also correct that there was sand in the gears of the conveyor belt once it started up. So where we are today is that in some places, you've seen things effectively return to normal.
Then in others, you still see this kind of, however you want to characterize it, delay, sand in the gears, starting and stopping. It won't probably surprise you to learn that there's some degree of correlation between the density of the urban population and the delays. And part of that is really a function of criminal cases. So New York, for example, continues to be, and Los Angeles continued to be more delayed than places that don't have as dense a population, therefore don't have as many criminal matters and are more delayed. And I make the criminal matters point because criminal cases in most jurisdictions have some sort of constitutional or other right to proceed at a particular pace. In the U.S., for example, there's what's called a speedy trial law.
So as a criminal defendant, you are entitled to have charges against you heard within a reasonable period of time. And so if you have criminal cases that have been aging, those cases are going to take priority over the kinds of civil cases that we do.
Andrew Hayden has a question on capital management. There are many examples of companies increasing shareholder value through opportunistic share buybacks. On the contrary, Burford has been a net issuer of new shares. Do you envision that one day Burford will join the list of companies buying back their stock? And if not, why not?
Chris, I think that one's directed towards me, so I'll jump in and take it. So look, overall, when we look at the opportunity to purchase our shares, I think first and foremost, we think about the long-term growth of the business and the expectation that we have that we can continue to invest in assets similar to what we currently have and continue to compound that growth. And we think that's the best use of our assets or of our current capital.
With respect to opportunistically buying back shares, I think that what I'm hesitant and we are hesitant about is levering up the balance sheet at a point in time and taking on that additional leverage just to be buying back shares when we see the opportunity to continue to invest. Is it always on the table and something we'll discuss? Absolutely.
Thanks, Jordan. The next question comes from John Lockwood. What do you see as the main inflection points over the next two years that are likely to make a significant uptrend for the share price?
So you're probably better able to answer that than I am because my focus is on running the business and generating desirable cash returns and hoping that investors reward that relatively high return, relatively high return on equity approach with a desirable valuation. I think obviously continued portfolio performance is a significant catalyst for the share price, whether that comes from many cases resolving, each of them not significantly, or whether that comes from some larger cases resolving with significant resolutions, including the continued activity in YPF. I think those are all things that are catalysts for the share price. I can see from some comments that people couldn't really hear Jordan when he was talking about buybacks. Rob, should we go back to that? Jordan, are you able to say something to see if we can hear you better?
And if not, I'll pinch it.
Can you hear me?
Yes, that's much better.
Okay. I didn't change anything, but I'll try it again. With respect to buying back shares, first and foremost, we believe that we have an attractive opportunity set that sits in front of us to continue to invest in litigation finance assets. And we see a long runway of that, and we think that the compounding nature associated with those assets is what's most beneficial to shareholders. I combine that with the fact that we're not looking to take on leverage for the sole purpose of buying back shares at this point, and we'd rather be taking on the additional capital to invest in the business and invest in the assets. Should we continue to look at that over time? The answer is yes, and we will accordingly.
Thanks, Jordan. The next question is on financial reporting, and it comes from Peter Quinn. A question on Burford's recent announcement of its bond repurchase and cancellation and similar types of announcements. The detail and terminology to the average Joe means little. I would welcome a short comment by a director in such an announcement stating, for instance, that the board is pleased to have made the repurchase at this level and the action represents a positive step forward. Can this be done in future?
I appreciate the feedback and take it under due notice. Rob, I hope you heard that question too. As we went through the simple piece here to give the voiceover, though, with respect to that transaction, we do have a liability that's coming due next year. If we can opportunistically use our cash to get that back below par, then that's a good use of our capital given the short duration that's remaining on that bond. We hear you loud and clear on the recommendation to make that clearer to investors.
Thanks, Jordan. Another question on capital management. It comes from Yongku Nan. In the event of a significant realization uptick due to the clearance of the COVID-19 backlog, what would be the company's preference regarding debt management versus increasing dividends and/or share buybacks?
So Jordan sort of addressed this to some extent already. But I guess the question can be almost more broad, dealing not only with a potential clearance of the backlog, but also with respect to YPF, since we're asked that question a fair bit as well. And I think the answer is that it really depends on where we see the demand dynamic in the business at the time as well. So as Jordan said, our—
Jordan, you're not muted. Our preference is to do as much high-value business as we can and continue to grow the business and compound those returns. We think that's a very desirable approach to capital management. To the extent that we have excess capital beyond that, I think all of those things need to be considered carefully, whether it's reducing debt, whether it's considering some sort of capital return to shareholders. I would say, though, that each of these things comes with their own set of issues on both sides, issues that are complex to manage. Our dividends, for example, are not qualified dividends for U.S. investor purposes. We've been quite successful in growing our book of U.S. investors. When we last measured it last year, we were right around half the shareholder registry is in the U.S. now.
And so there is not a lot of enthusiasm for dividends, and certainly not for increased dividends from those shareholders because the tax consequences for them are unfavorable. So we have to take that into account. And when we think about share buybacks, the other dynamic, of course, is that we would like to be increasing, not decreasing, the amount of trading liquidity that our shares have. And so a meaningful reduction in share liquidity is also something that one would have to look at quite cautiously. And.
Thanks, Chris.
Yeah. One more question. I see there's a question about settlement decisions in the chat.
Yeah. We could just go to that. That comes from Danny Gonzales. And the question is, how involved are you in the client's settlement decision? And is there any pushback from the law community on your interaction with clients outside of providing financing?
So as a general proposition, clients retain settlement authority, and we are a passive provider of financing. In those circumstances, we may well be asked for our advice and our thoughts about settlements, which we're happy to give, especially since, as I discussed at some length earlier, we have a whole bunch of data that our clients don't necessarily have access to. And so that is usually a constructive and positive undertaking. There are circumstances where we are more involved in cases, but those are circumstances where there has been, for whatever reason, specific arrangements, specific contracting for us to be more involved. We might be hired, for example, to provide litigation management services, and we might then have a much larger role to play in the cases.
That, for example, is the case in the YPF cases where the Petersen clients are in bankruptcy in Spain and don't have a functioning corporate team. And so we have stepped in to provide the kind of legal services there that you might otherwise normally associate with coming from in-house counsel. And then there are other circumstances as well. We sometimes will be appointed by other bankruptcy courts or will even buy claims out of bankruptcy. And in those instances, we become directly involved. In terms of pushback on that, I think that the important point is that it be clear about what's happening, that when we are the party, that we are the party. And I think that that has always been the case for us. The reality is that complex litigation almost always has multiple actors.
It's rare that there is not somebody, a big investor, a private equity firm, somebody who has a view about what the named plaintiff or the named defendant should be doing. And I don't think there's anything unusual in that in complex litigation. So with that, I think that we have come to the end of our time, and I want to thank you all for joining us. We do these every year to give people access and a way to pose questions that often I find is somewhat dominated by institutional shareholders. So we hope you find this helpful. We're always delighted to have your feedback directly and outside of a venue like this. But once again, thank you very much for taking the time, and I'll give you back to Rob.
Thank you, Chris. I just simply wanted to add that for everyone's benefit and as a reminder, there will be a replay facility of today's session, which will be available shortly after the event by the same webcast registration link that you use to access today's audio webcast. As always, we encourage you to reach out to us with any follow-up questions through the usual channels, or you can email ir@burfordcapital.com. And thank you again for participating, and please enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you.