Hello, this is Robert Bailhache, and I'm Head of Investor Relations, EMEA and Asia, here at Burford Capital. I and Jim Ballan, who heads our IR in Americas, would like to welcome you on behalf of the entire Burford team to today's Global Retail Shareholder conference call. We're delighted to have you join our audio webcast, and we hope you find this forum useful. As with 2020, we recognize the pandemic has affected a number of our usual events to meet with you in person, and we wanted to try to connect notwithstanding these challenges. We've had another strong level of response to this conference call, for which we're grateful, both in terms of numbers of participants and questions. Before we start, I might turn the call over to Chris Bogart, who plans to make some brief remarks before we move to Q&A. I want to cover a few housekeeping basics. You can ask a question at any time during the webcast by typing it into the Q&A box you can see on your screen. This is discreet to each of you and us. If you have any technical questions for our production team in our virtual green room, you can also use that same Q&A box for that purpose. We'll endeavor to get through as many questions as possible, but due to the significant volume of queries we've received, Chris won't have time to respond to all of them during the time we have today. We've taken the questions we've received and tried to group them up by topic, so while we may not pose each of your precise questions, we'll certainly attempt to address every subject that's been raised. If there are new subjects from the live Q&A feed, we will try to get to those, too. Worth mentioning, too, that we can't take questions that seek a business update other than what we've already made public, or those that look for forward guidance. While Chris does have a hard stop at 90 minutes, he's willing to go beyond an hour if there's interest in him doing so. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Chris Bogart, Burford's Chief Executive Officer. Great. Thanks very much, Rob, hello, everybody. I'm thrilled to be able to speak with so many of you. We've had such a volume of interest in posing questions, I'm not going to make a long substantive introduction here. Rather, we're going to move almost immediately to your questions. Obviously, the pandemic has disrupted some of the opportunities for contact and communication that we've historically had, principally by me coming and doing various events in London. I'm beginning to forget what London looks like these days. I was hoping to be back, it seems like that's not happening quite as rapidly as I was originally thinking it might. We thought that we would just put this call on and be able to connect with people and talk about the business that way. As Rob noted, given obviously the various disclosure constraints on public companies, we're not able to talk about what's been going on in 2021 except very thematically around things like what's going on with the courts and so on, but we're not in a position to give a business update until we actually go and report earnings and give a business update to the market. We're delighted to have so much participation. Thank you so much for such thoughtful questions that show the level of engagement that so many of you have with the company. We really are deeply grateful for that. With that, Rob, maybe we should just fire away. Okay, Chris. The first question comes from Martin Devine: As we gradually emerge from the pandemic, please give an update on any improvements in the court hearing processes in the U.S. and Europe that were previously disrupted, leading to delays. I love part of the question with the use of the word "improvement," even though I think Martin probably wasn't thinking exactly the same way that I am. Let me address two separate things. One is obviously the thrust of the question, which is what's going on with court delays, but let me also just comment briefly on actual improvements in the court process that I think have the potential to give us some efficiency benefits going forward. The short answer on court delays is that courts have generally been pretty good at keeping themselves running during the course of the pandemic. As you saw in 2020, we were able to post record levels of realizations coming out of court decisions. Basically, if you've got cases that just rely on judges or on arbitrators, those matters have largely been proceeding. On the other hand, if you have cases that needed jury trials, which is particularly in the United States, most jurisdictions have not resumed civil jury trials. Some have not resumed jury trials at all yet, and some have resumed them for criminal matters, but not for civil matters. It is pretty rare still to see a civil jury trial. The reason, by the way, for that priority is there's a constitutional protection in the United States for criminal defendants to have a speedy trial, and so criminal cases take precedence going through the system. Now, nowhere close to all of our cases need jury trials. Obviously, cases that settle before they get to trial are not affected by this either. We're talking about a comparatively modest pool of matters, but there's no question that those matters are seeing some delay because of the absence of jury trials. That delay has a knock-on consequence. In the sense that it is often the impending trial that brings parties to the table and have them negotiating for settlement. If that pressure doesn't exist, then that sort of motivation doesn't exist either. All that being said, the other thing I think that is important to recognize when you consider pandemic effects on businesses is that the effect on us is just delay. It may even be profitable delay because our returns do tend to go up as time passes, even if that is happening because of nobody's fault, in just the same way that bank interest continues to run. We have not had a single client come along and say, "Well, gee, this is taking too long now, and so we're not going to carry on with our case anymore." We've just had no instance of that whatsoever. Unlike the people whose businesses have had permanent losses from the pandemic, airlines, hotels, restaurants and so on, we are not in that situation. Every single case that we have is still continuing to run, and we may even end up having greater profitability from some of them because of pandemic-related delays. The point that I wanted to touch on was the improvement point as well. It used to be that pretty much everything in litigation happened in person. As a trial lawyer, I would fly across the country for the sake of a 20-minute status conference, for example. I do think there is scope post-pandemic for courts and arbitration tribunals to engage in a more efficient way of managing cases and managing their dockets. I don't believe that we're going to go to a world where you don't have trials in person where you cross-examine a witness and you actually are there at the same place. I do think there is considerable scope for efficiency, and I think judges have been surprised at how well this has worked. I would hope to see some of those things come into play. That might well have some future efficiency benefits for our portfolio going forward. Okay. Our next question comes from Nikolay Kudinov. Burford has mentioned its marketing focus on big corporate clients along with traditional law firms. How would you describe the difference between the two groups in terms of, A, case funding needs, B, coverage by legal finance providers, and C, ease of finding quality matters for Burford to invest in? Thanks. The premise of the question is absolutely right. We treat as our client population both law firms and the corporate clients. The dynamic really sort of breaks down as follows. When a corporate client is trying to get what I call traditional litigation funding, in other words, the funding of fees and expenses of taking on an ongoing piece of litigation, often what the client will do is turn to the law firm, tell the law firm to go and find a way for the case to get done, we may find ourselves engaging first with the law firm, even if the underlying contractual counterparty ends up being the corporate client. Those law firm relationships are very important, and they're the foot in the door, if you will. What's going on there is that companies are basically seeking P&L side relief. They don't want the cost of litigation to be running through their P&L and reducing their earnings because their perception is that shareholders will punish them for the reduced earnings and will not reward them for the one-time gains associated with their litigation recoveries. They're trying to push those costs off the P&L. Where the more direct corporate interaction comes into play is as corporate clients have increasingly come to realize that they have valuable assets sitting inside the company that are effectively invisible. Those valuable assets, of course, being claims or pending litigation matters. We don't put those things on the balance sheet for companies. We don't even footnote them, so you as investors don't even know that they're there. You're not likely to do anything other than treat them as extraordinary or one-time gains when they do succeed. Companies have realized that these effectively invisible assets, while they are a source of potential future cash for the company, can be used today as a liquidity vehicle by having Burford come along and monetize some of the underlying potential asset value from the claims. That's the kind of work that we tend to do directly with companies. Those are the differences between the funding needs. There is no question that we have an outsized position compared to the traditional litigation funding marketplace with corporate clients for larger deals simply because of our scale, our branding, and our reputation in the market, and our ability to do larger deals. We do single deals sometimes that are larger than the total available capital of some of our competitors. Okay. Daniel Goldblum asks: Is competition starting to cause a reduction in the number of cases you get offered or a reduction in margins? What competition is doing is something that we've always been very bullish on. Those of you who have followed us for a while have heard me say for years that we welcome market entry. The reason for that is that what we see competition doing is enlarging the total market. What's happening is we're taking an industry, the legal industry, that has not historically been a capital user, and by applying capital to it, we're really transforming the industry. That is something that has been happening pretty much from a standing start about a decade ago. While we have moved out of the phase of this being an unknown, esoteric thing for people to do, we still are by no means in the mainstream. You can see that from the numbers. If you just put up slide eight, if you wouldn't mind. You'll see just looking, and again, you've seen these numbers before. They're about the size of the legal industry and the size of the judgment market. I don't for a moment hold this out as the addressable market for litigation finance. The addressable market for what we do is smaller than this. There's $860 billion a year of legal fees paid. Lots of those legal fees have nothing to do with litigation. It just goes to show you the sheer scale of the legal business and how small litigation finance remains in proportion to the legal business. That, I think, is the key point. If what we're trying to have happen is for the use of legal finance to be ubiquitous, for it to be in just the same way that when a company goes and buys a new capital asset, even something as minor as a photocopier. You're likely to see a little financial analysis around lease versus rent versus buy. That's just completely ordinary, completely pedestrian, and that's what we would like to see people doing with their litigation as well, that every single time you commence a piece of litigation, you just do a little financial analysis. That alone will drive an enormous expansion of this market because it's a concept that makes so much sense so often. The emergence of real, meaningful competitors means that this is just like investment banking, becoming a mainstream part of the corporate existence, and the pie is being enlarged. That's really what we like about competition. Nikolay Kudinov has asked a question. Burford kept its head count flat in 2020 due to the global pandemic. Do you have plans to increase head count to gain market share in the period ahead? We do. Basically, what we've gone back to is our traditional approach to growing the business, which is to moderately increase our staffing every year. We've done that every year since we were founded, with the exception of the pandemic-related interruption, it's something that we intend to go back to. We have, in fact, resumed hiring in 2021. Among other things, we've put a permanent person on the ground in Hong Kong and in Texas. We covered those regions from other places before, but we didn't have people on the ground. We've also continued to expand both our underwriting capacity and also our finance and back office capacity. I think that's just an inevitable consequence of the continued growth in the business. If you look at our portfolio, maybe we'll just throw up slide 6 to remind everybody. If you look at the portfolio, we've gone from half a billion dollars five years ago to $4.5 billion now. That's a 52% CAGR over the last five years. That rate of growth simply necessitates some more people, not only to do new business and as the question suggests, but also to continue to manage existing business and a fairly rapidly growing overall business. That being said, the way that we've always approached this is pretty moderately. It's not our view that the best course of action is to simply sprinkle people rapidly all over the landscape and drive the cost base through the roof, as though we were Uber or something, believing that if we spend a lot of money for a long time and lose a lot of money, ultimately we'll turn a profit. Maybe that'll work for Uber, but it's not my approach to the right way of building a growth business. Our next question comes from Bruce Anderson. Assuming that the cases within the portfolio at that end December 2020 are concluded, yielding returns in line with those historically reported by the business, what might the portfolio on completion be worth? Well, that's an interesting question because it is one way, of course, of analytically looking at the business. My own view about how to look at Burford is obviously including a growth metric. Right now, what you're getting is not only a static portfolio of assets, but you're also getting a team and a brand and a business that is capable of obviously producing ongoing growth. Of course, we value as investors, both of those components. We don't just look to the static asset value of the portfolio. However, you can certainly establish that baseline by simply looking at the historical data. You simply look at the portfolio, as it stands today. You look at the basic components of return and duration that we've generated historically. You make whatever assumptions you care to make about those data points, and you come up with part of the answer. That's something that is not that hard to do, and it also allows you to factor in whatever your own views are about the future. You could take a view, as one of the prior questions did, that, gee, the presence of competition is going to drive down price, and therefore you might reduce the returns attributable to those assets. On the other hand, you might take the view that we've become better as we've aged about making investment decisions, and therefore the returns might go up. I think that's the kind of work that is appropriate for analysts and investors to do. With the clear addition from my perspective, that that needs to be combined with the concept of ongoing growth. Derry O'Callaghan asks, "With all the ransomware and cybersecurity issues at present, does management think security needs to be increased, and will this have a material impact on costs? I don't think security needs to be increased because this is an area that we are already extremely focused on, and have always been. Some of you have probably even heard me say in the past that I think information security is one of the things or maybe even the predominant thing that keeps me up at night in this business. We have such a large and well-diversified portfolio now that when we were smaller, the risk of making a single bad investment would keep me up at night. That's gone today. Our portfolio is so large and so diversified that a bad investment, even a large bad investment, isn't the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. What keeps me up at night is a catastrophic information technology breach. Because that's an area that we've long been focused on, and that's an area that comes out of my professional background as well. As some of you know, before doing Burford, I was a technology venture capitalist and before that ran Time Warner's advanced technology business. It's an area that we designed the business from the ground up around. Just to elaborate on why we're sensitive to this issue. It's not so much ransomware and so on, even though that's very much the issue in vogue today. It's rather the risk of the public disclosure of legally privileged information. We have in our files an enormous amount of confidential, sensitive, privileged information about some of the world's largest and most complex litigation matters. We need that information to do our investment analysis, and we are entitled to get it. We are entitled to fall under what is called the work product umbrella, and we get the internal protected analyses of the outside lawyers and of the client. If we were to have a widespread breach of that, and that's not information that's available to a litigation opponent, that would be not good for litigation were that to become widely publicized. We have always been focused on protecting that information. We have a robust, market-leading IT team. We've always invested in this area, and we've also designed the architecture to be as secure as one can make it. The reason it keeps me up at night, of course, is that nothing today is 100% secure. There's a follow-up from Derry O'Callaghan. As we saw in 2020, there were stellar returns from a number of related cases for which the company is to be greatly commended. How does the company balance the concentration in related cases with the overall diversification of the portfolio? Well, it's a little bit of a continuum. Here's generally how the concentrated matters come to be. It's very unusual for us to come along and just say out of the blue, "Ha. Here's a matter we love it. We're going to just dump a whole lot of money into it." What tends to happen, let's use the pool of related cases that concluded in 2020 effectively as a case study. What tends to happen is that early in the case's life, we look at these cases, we take a view that we're interested in them. We'll probably make an initial or call it a toehold investment in the matter to gain some initial exposure. It will be very much on our radar screen. What happened in those cases is, and I don't have a slide on this in this deck, and so you'll have to not hold me to the precise dates, but directionally what I'm about to say is correct. I think we made our first investment in those matters in 2016. We were only invested then in a couple of matters, if memory serves, and we made a non-concentrated investment. We watched. As time passed and as the litigation proceeded, we gained incremental conviction. We didn't do any investing in 2017. We didn't add any exposure in 2017, so we just sat. By the time we got to 2018, our conviction level had become quite high, and so we began adding incremental exposure. We did that throughout 2018 and 2019. Ultimately, we were vindicated in that decision, and those matters paid in 2020. That's sort of the approach that we take when we see something that is capable of having an investment expressed over a number of matters. Of course, a number of our cases simply don't fit that bill. When you simply have one company fighting with another company about something that is unique to the two of them, there's no opportunity to add incremental exposure to that. You're simply going to do one financing, and that case will take its course. When we do see multiple case opportunities, typically because there's been an industry-wide wrongdoing or because there's been one party wrongdoing that affects many other parties. An example of the latter is a securities fraud issue, an example of the former, so something like Wirecard, for example. An example of the former would be anti-competitive practices like the trucks cartel in Europe. When things like that happen, then we have the opportunity to take on incremental exposure. That's how we really go about doing it. To some extent, the portfolio balances itself naturally because the single cases that we take on that don't have the opportunity to carry on. That's a meaningful part of our business. I think always will be. Those are simply always going to be individual diverse matters. Okay. Colin McPhee asks, "If we assume the average life of funded legal cases has increased from, say, two years to 2.5 years, that implies a 25% increase in capital requirement to fund existing and new cases. That would mean the funds for the recent debt issue could be largely used up funding the continuing caseload. Does this mean there isn't much scope for further expansion without another capital raise? No, I don't think so. I think there's a balance to be struck here and probably a little bit more nuance to it, because the assumption there, I think, almost assumes that our capital goes out on day 1, then we're simply waiting to see how long it takes to come back in. Whereas that's not, in fact, how the capital flows. I don't think we have a slide on it, but we do have a graph in the annual report that makes just this point, and it shows you sort of for each vintage, shows you how much capital went out at closing and then what the pace of capital was as time passed. What that shows you is that it can take, and that chart is on page 37 of the annual report, in case you're interested in seeing it. Basically what that shows you is, first of all, there's some disparity in timing by vintage, but it shows you as a trend that a fair bit of the capital flows out over time. We're able to manage. Because we have pretty good visibility into that, we're able to manage capital around it. Just to put this in context, one of the most expensive parts of litigation is actually going to trial. We know for each jurisdiction how long it generally takes to get a case to go to trial. That data that we can find, it's either public as it is in the U.S. or we may have some proprietary data around it. For example, in San Diego, California, it takes about three years to get a federal civil case to trial, and that's not even including COVID. We know that X% of the budget that's allocated to trial is not going to be spent in the first couple of years of the life of the case. We're able to manage that more closely, which is why we're able to carry a fairly large balance of undrawn commitments at any given time without needing to reserve cash against them for a variety of reasons that we've detailed in the past. Okay. A question from Daniel Goldblum. "While recognizing you're limited in discussing details of cases, please expand as much as possible on recent developments and the likely timescale for Petersen. When is it reasonable to expect an outcome assuming there's no settlement? Also, what's the significance of the recent Spanish court judgment? When you think about Petersen, I think it's important to remember that Petersen is really two separate cases within one, if you want to think of it in those terms. Before you can bring a substantive action against a sovereign government like Argentina in another country's courts, you have to go through a process of convincing the courts in the other country, in this case, in the United States, that it is acceptable for them to overcome the principle of sovereign immunity, and allow the other sovereign to be hauled into court. That's how the Petersen case started, and that was a significant risk in the case, as it always is with foreign sovereigns, and it was litigated aggressively. We won that portion of the case, but that case went all the way through the litigation process, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. We won at every stage. That portion of the case is now over. Now the case is basically just like another plain vanilla, ordinary contract dispute. Because what the Petersen case in substance is a breach of contract claim that says that Argentina breached its contractual obligation to tender for 100% of the YPF shares if it retook control. Argentina clearly retook control. That's not disputed, but they obviously did not tender for the remaining shares. That's also not disputed. In fact, one of the Argentine government officials called it a bear trap, but nobody should believe that they would have abided by their promise in that regard. That's the case that's now going through federal court. It is moving consistent with a U.S. federal court case. There are a series of stages that the case goes through. The first of those stages is fact discovery, where the parties exchange documents and witness testimony through what are called depositions. Those are in-person oral examinations under oath. After fact discovery, you have a period of expert discovery where expert witnesses come and provide reports and so on. You then have some motion practice, and then you have trial. All of this is enshrined in a schedule that is set by the court. Fact discovery ends this summer. Expert discovery occurs in the fall, and the case is set for trial sometime in mid next year. That schedule, it is very common for those schedules to be set aggressively at the beginning of the case, just as this one was, and for the schedule then to be adjusted as time passes to reflect the realities of what's happening in the case. That is exactly what has happened here, too, and that should not be at all surprising to anyone. That being said, you only have a finite number of those schedule adjustments. Barring something unforeseen, you wouldn't expect the schedule to slip a whole lot more at this point because fact discovery tends to be the place where there's the most play in the schedule. That's really what's happening with Petersen. You would expect a world, all things being equal, and again, this is all public, so anyone can look at the court docket at any time and see where the case stands. I'm no better at forecasting this than anybody else. At the moment, you would reasonably expect the case to go to trial next year. This is a bench trial. This is a case being tried just to the judge. There's not a jury. After the trial, the judge will write an opinion, just as happens in English courts. That opinion will be the judgment. That all is sort of moving forward on track at the moment. I'm sorry, the Spanish court judgment, I think, one of the things you do when you're a defendant with a difficult substantive case is you try hard to raise collateral issues. This case is all about collateral issues because there's not a particularly strong defense on the merits. You'll see that kind of collateral noise, and I think that it doesn't have any particular impact. On YPF, Colin McPhee asks, "The usual pattern of Argentina seeking to delay the definitive hearing has continued. However, in the most recent application, it appears that Burford supported increasing delay. Please explain the thinking behind these tactics. Also, please explain where the discovery process has reached." I think you covered the latter part, Chris, already. Right. On the former part, I'm not really in a position to go into detailed tactics around litigating an individual case. I will just say, generally speaking, as a legal matter, one of the things you have to do as a lawyer is weigh your credibility with the court, which includes acting reasonably if you are reasonably confident that the court's going to grant a request. It doesn't do you any particular good to oppose it just on some point of principle because you'll just look sort of silly and you'll lose to boot. Chris Bates asks, "If you win the Petersen case and the defendants refuse to pay, won't you have trouble enforcing the judgment? Argentina is obviously a well-resourced sovereign with significant international capital markets engagement. You have seen a history of Argentina paying or settling awards made against it in the past. We'll cross that bridge if we need to come to it. Obviously we took on the case believing that we could collect on the judgment and we've now had significant secondary sales to institutional investors, who also would not have bought into the case if they had not believed that there were paths to collection. George Croft asks, "What are Burford's plans in the event it receives a large realization that it sees deployment opportunities in the immediate future? Will it favor reinvesting in new lines of business or returning capital to shareholders? Yeah. That's sort of a variation on the question that I get a fair bit, which is, if you win Petersen, you pay a special dividend. My answer to that question has always been, let's win the case first and then figure out what to do with the money instead of hypothesizing about it right now. I don't think we as a company or as a board have an answer to that at the moment. Okay. Mordechai Yavneh asks, "Burford has in the past made investments into firms such as Manolete and PCB Litigation. How is the accounting for these investments done? Where does this show up on the balance sheet and income statement? Is Burford satisfied with the outcome of these types of investments? Are we satisfied? Yes. PCB is in early days, but it's been perfectly satisfactory up to now and we were perfectly satisfied with the profit that we made on Manolete. The accounting is very structure dependent. The two things are quite different actually. If we're making a pure equity investment, then that's going to be treated just like any other pure equity investment on the balance sheet. You'll see it in minority holdings or whatever the accounting term is for that. However, what we're doing with something like PCB is we're not just being equity investors in the law firm. In fact, we're not even predominantly being equity investors in the law firm. What we're doing is we're providing a portfolio financing arrangement, just as we do to many other law firms. We're doing it effectively with a twist. Instead of all of our returns coming out of the performance of the cases that are in the portfolio, what we instead have done is sort of combined it with an equity kicker, if you want to think of it in those terms. There, a decent amount of the return is going to come from the portfolio arrangement. The equity will be the icing, if you want to think of it in those terms. In that case, the accounting would obviously reflect also the portfolio arrangement. Right. Question from Mark Guthrie, "Do you value funded cases at the lower of cost or estimated realizable value or at current valuation? The way that we value litigation cases is we start by putting them onto the balance sheet at their invested cost. The dollars actually out the door, and there's no P&L implication at that point. Then we hold the case at invested cost. In other words, again, whatever the checks that we've written, we hold the case at invested cost until there is some objective event in the underlying case that would cause it to change value based on our valuation policy. That valuation policy is designed, obviously to reflect what a market participant would pay to buy that investment from us. If we've had a judicial resolution that has gone well, then presumably the market value of that case has gone up. If we've had a judicial resolution that's gone poorly, then presumably the value of the case has gone down. We actually disclose in Note 21 of our financial statements, we disclose the various factors that would cause a valuation change and the portion of each of those valuation changes in the portfolio. There you can see that they're objective levels. They're things like winning at trial, winning on appeal, and so on. That's how we go about valuing. Cost until there's a defined event and then the application of our valuation policy once there is that defined event which we disclose. Question from Jonathan Byrne. Is the secondary market still open to monetizations and/or valuing other claims? Yes. I think the answer is yes. The dynamic, though, that we use when approaching the secondary market is one of a desire to continue to build it on the one hand, but also a question of when we feel as though it's in our best interest. That presents some challenges because if you don't have a matter like Petersen that has a significant amount of public data available about it can be difficult to give investors enough information to make a sensible purchase decision without running afoul of the legal protections applicable to the information. In just the same way that we can't give you, as public investors, a chapter and book about what's in the portfolio and what's happening with the underlying cases. Apologies to the shareholder if I've mispronounced his name. Question from Guki Reza. In case the global minimum corporation tax is approved, as the OECD is negotiating, what will be the impact on Burford's tax rate given the company has stated it expects its tax rate to settle in the low teens over time? That requires a crystal ball that is more finely tuned than the one that I possess about international tax. I suppose I am a skeptic about the speed and definiteness of the kinds of global tax regimes that are being proposed. I am happy to wait and see if they come into being before worrying too much about them. The reality is that, as the question says, we long guided that we expect the tax rate to be in the low teens over time. There are certainly participants in those discussions where that reflects the current tax rate. It's not merely a question of getting an OECD-level global agreement about something like this, which I continue to be a skeptic or a cynic about, take your pick. It's also the fact that I am dubious in the extreme that you're going to see jurisdictions raise and harmonize their corporate taxes to the kind of level that would cause Burford to have a significant tax exposure in the near or even the medium term. We'll just have to wait to see what comes out of this process. Just to editorialize, when I was a baby lawyer, actually even before that, there was the negotiation of the Law of the Sea Treaty. That was something that was in everybody's interest, and you would think that everybody should have signed onto it, and it still took, I think, something like 25 years to get over the line. Thanks, Chris. A question from Miguel Medina. Do you see scope for litigation funding in China? Well, that's an interesting question. I think China is a fascinating and difficult-to-predict place for these kinds of businesses. And the reason for that is that it really remains open to be seen how infrequently there is political interference with the operation of commercial litigation in China. We don't today do business that would require us to enforce judgments in mainland China, not because we believe that the system is, as a whole, unreliable or corrupt, but because we believe that there are instances where it's difficult to predict its transparency, and if you find yourself in one of those instances, which can be fairly rare, but that can not go well for you. At the same time, China has clearly been engaging in more and more transparent dispute resolution. For example, there is an arbitral institution called CIETAC in China, which has grown very rapidly and now handles an enormous volume of arbitration matters. We have engaged with them over time. We've actually come and made presentations about litigation funding to their membership. I think there are some green shoots there. My view about China is that it's a massive market, of course, it's interesting to keep an eye on. At the same time, it's not a market today that I would go and devote an enormous amount of resource and time and attention to trying to crack as opposed to continuing to gather some low-hanging fruit in more established markets. I think that in the near term, we'll get a significantly higher ROI on incremental U.S. and European expansion than we would in mainland China. It's something, obviously, as you can tell from my sort of windy answer, that it's something that is not completely off our radar screen. Question from Daniel Goldblum. I understand the importance of reinvesting cash to expand your investments, but I believe shareholders would also like to see increasing dividends. Would you consider increasing dividends? Burford's dividend policy is probably the one area where there is, in my historical experience, the least agreement across the shareholder population. We have some shareholders who would like a reliable, predictable dividend. We have some shareholders who would like a dividend that is pegged to performance so that it goes up if the business does well, but can also come down again if the business has a slow period. Of course, as you all know, this is a business that can have very volatile earnings from cash flow simply because the reason that it's a nice investment is because it's uncorrelated to the broader economy. The reason for that lack of correlation is that our cash all comes from cases and who knows when judges decide them. There's that sort of strain of dividend approach. There's also a not insignificant population of shareholders who do not want Burford to pay a dividend at all. They view the rates of return that we generate as being sufficiently high that we should reinvest all of the capital that we generate in new investment opportunities as opposed to paying any of it out in dividends. There are some who not only hold that view, but hold it because dividends are tax inefficient. That's especially true in the United States, where capital gains tax rates are considerably lower, at least right now, than the tax rates on Burford's dividends. I think there is a wide range of views across our shareholder base. What we've historically done is tried to chart a middle course, recognizing that there are many shareholders who want to see us paying a dividend, not only so they get some cash income, but so they see the discipline around management having to be able to pay a dividend. That's why we've set a fixed dividend that doesn't vary year to year by performance. At the same time, there are a number of shareholders who think we either shouldn't be doing that or think we certainly shouldn't be doing any more of it. I think having just restored the dividend in full and retroactively following the COVID-related suspension, I think we'll sit with that dividend level for a bit, and then take shareholder temperature about it again. Paul Summerskill asks, would investor demand for Burford's equity be enhanced by switching its LSE listing from AIM to the main market with all of the passive fund buying that would come with FTSE 250 or FTSE 350 index membership? We don't think so, especially weighed against the incremental cost and effort that would be required. We made a conscious decision on this subject after taking quite a lot of specialist advice from bankers and brokers and so on, that we would be best served if we could pull it off by combining a U.S. listing and the retention of the AIM listing. It wasn't certain at that time that we could pull it off. There had never been a litigation finance firm listed in the U.S. before. We were successful in getting that done and adding the New York Stock Exchange listing. We think that's been a success. The reason we think that is because we've seen incremental U.S. investor entry into the stock. Not as much, no doubt, as if we had done a secondary offering at the time of the New York Stock Exchange launch, that would have caused us to issue dilutive equity at what we thought was an unappealing price to existing shareholders. We've been happy with the early days on the New York Stock Exchange, that's a not insignificant thing to bite off. It comes with a different disclosure regime, Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, a different accounting standard when we move to US GAAP. I think biting off all those things and doing them well is our priority for the moment. We don't see the value warranting the additional complication of also up-listing to the main market. Had we not done the New York Stock Exchange listing, we had said at the time that our second choice would be to up-list to the main market, and we would have done that. As things turned out, we didn't need to go down that road. Question from Jonathan Byrne. Do you anticipate a significant increase in business as a result of COVID-related claims? I think we'll just have to see is the question. What we know about COVID is there was an enormous amount of economic disruption. The things that will arise out of COVID really fall into several buckets. There's insured litigation, in other words, litigation between policyholders and their insurance companies about whether the losses that they experienced during the course of the pandemic were covered by their relevant insurance policy. There's uninsured litigation. There's litigation between contractual counterparties about who bears the loss of something that was unavoidable. An example of those kinds of cases are you're a banana grower, and you pack a ship full of bananas and send them off to your customer, and by the time they get to the customer's port, the port has been closed because of COVID, and the bananas spoil before they can be offloaded. There's a clear loss there, and then there's simply the question of who's going to bear the loss. Somebody has to. Is it going to be the seller or is it going to be the buyer? The third sort of COVID-related set of litigation will be business distress. Going back through those categories, insurance coverage litigation is going to depend very much on the jurisdiction. Some courts, and you've seen the U.K. do this, some courts have come along and tried to give some real guidance about how COVID fits into the policy language. They've done that basically to avoid or to try to avoid a tsunami of insurance coverage cases. I think it's too early to see how that will work, how insurers respond, whether insurers just simply pay some of these claims or whether they resist them. I think there will be a lot of the second category of claim, just because there were a lot of those kinds of losses, and those kinds of claims can take a long time to bring. Just as we saw the global financial crisis in 2009, 2010 spawn a considerable amount of litigation that we did over time, that litigation didn't all appear in 2009 or 2010. It took years to appear, and in fact, we're still today doing financial crisis litigation. That's the nature of litigation. It's a long, slow wave as opposed to a sharp shock to the system. The third category, I think we haven't even really started to see yet because of the level in many countries of government stimulus. I think we've got some pent-up business instability sitting there, and I think we'll, over time, as opposed to immediately see the insolvency and related impact. That's an area that we obviously get a decent amount of business from when it's occurring. Question from Daniel Goldblum. What are your views on the relatively low level of trading and liquidity of the shares on the NYSE? Is there anything you could do to increase the company's profile in the U.S., or indeed elsewhere, which would increase the level of trading and potentially the share price? That's sort of what I was talking about earlier. There are two ways to enter the U.S. market. One is organically, which is what we've chosen to do, and the other is with an event, with a capital raising. If you enter with a big capital raising, then you have all of the panoply of things that go along with that. You have investment bankers touting the stock, you've got research analysts, you've got a roadshow that attracts attention. That would require us to sell a meaningful amount of incremental equity at a price last fall that we simply didn't think was appropriate for the intrinsic value of the company and we thought would have been unduly dilutive to our existing shareholders. Knowing that we were sacrificing sort of the quick pop, if you will, we opted instead for the organic approach. The organic approach, of course, means time. We're actually quite happy with how things have gone. As I said earlier, we've increased the portion of U.S. shareholders in the register. We've seen buying in the U.S. from institutions that we like. We just picked up last month our first U.S.-based research coverage. We have in Jim Ballan, as mentioned by Rob earlier, a full-time Head of U.S. IR on the ground in the U.S. That's all Jim does all day long is pitch Burford to American investors. With Ken Brause, our new CFO, Ken has a huge specialty finance background, 35 years in a whole bunch of prestigious specialty finance businesses. Also a heavy IR history. Among other things, ran IR for a time for CIT, which is the U.S.'s largest non-bank specialty finance firm. It's clearly an area of focus for us, but it's also something that will build over time in our view, as opposed to coming with a bang. Martin Devine asks, "What's your level of ambition for Burford looking out over three- five years? Well, I think it's significant. I think if you were to walk inside the business and talk to the people, you would find the Burford team to be very charged up about what's going on in the market, our position in the market, and what we think the opportunity is. Back to the point that I was making earlier, that while we've seen impressive growth in this business, it's been off of a small base. We were a startup a decade ago. So even though sticking a 52% CAGR on numbers sounds great, we're still just scratching the surface of the overall size of the legal industry. So, I think we believe that there are many more clients to convert to using financing around their litigation. I'll tease this a little bit. We do a fair bit of independent research, and we're soon to come out with some new independent research that really makes that point as well. That suggests that there is a desire for capital solutions by corporate clients, and an unfulfilled desire. I do think there is a very significant opportunity here. I think Burford is very well-positioned to take the lead in addressing that very significant opportunity. We are all in, as the phrase goes. I think you can see from small things that are nonetheless significant in the employee population about that belief. You see quite a number of employees investing in the business. Whether it's by investing in the funds or whether it's by taking excess, converting bonus cash dollars into stock plan dollars, things like that we offer. Those are all, to my mind, pretty strong indicators that it's not just my own view, but it's the view of what is clearly the market-leading team in the industry. There's a follow-up from Martin Devine which, given the time, probably represents a good point to bring today's session to a close, and it's on a more humorous note. Any views on who will win the England V Scotland game in London tonight? Not that I'm prepared to express and risk angering one part or the other of this conversation. I'm Canadian, not American, but I still have a healthy view that involving myself in European sports is a dangerous place for me to be. Well, thank you, Chris. I would just like to say thank you to all of our shareholders for taking the time to join Chris and myself today. We hope you found this session helpful. The replay facility for the conference call will be available shortly after the conclusion of this real-time event via the same link that you used to access today's call. 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. Thank you again for participating, and do enjoy the rest of your day. Yes, thanks to all of you for your interest and such terrific questions. I really appreciate it. Thank you.