Hello, this is Robert 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 2023 CEO audio webcast for our retail shareholders around the world. Thank you for your interest, and we hope you find this forum useful. Before we start with my handing over to Chris Bogart, some housekeeping. After Chris gives some opening 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 any technical questions for our production team in our virtual green room, you can use the same private Q&A box for that purpose, too. We'll try to get through as many questions as possible, but due to the time we have available, Chris won't be able to respond to each of them. A selection of the questions we've already received are grouped by topic, and we'll attempt to address 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. Finally, a replay will be available to registrants a short while after today's event, using the link you've been provided with. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Chris Bogart, Burford's Chief Executive Officer. Great. Thanks very much, Rob, and thanks to all of you for taking the time to join us today. I'm delighted to be able to take a bunch of questions about Burford and its business. Before I do that, we just have a few slides, many fewer than from our earnings presentation, so just a few slides to hit some high notes. Why don't we start with slide 3 exactly. You know, it's an exciting time for Burford. The last couple of years have been quite aggravating on the one hand, as courts closed or slowed down because of COVID. The great thing about this business, one of the many great things about this business is that our cash flows, our recoveries, are just generated by the operation of the litigation process. If you think about the litigation process as a giant conveyor belt, it moves forward once you file a case. It may move at varying speeds, it may twist, it may turn, but it moves forward inexorably, and it gets to an end. That ending, for us, has historically happened on a weighted average basis within, you know, sort of 2.5 years of making investments. That's the traditional state of play in this business, and one of the things that's terrific about that is that the operation of that conveyor belt is unrelated to economic conditions and market activity. Unfortunately, what it is sensitive to is the courts actually continuing to operate the conveyor belt. What we saw in various ways over the last few years was that conveyor belt slowing or even stopping altogether. As a result, we were seeing a, effectively a buildup of backlog, notwithstanding the fact that demand for our capital remained strong, in fact, at record levels. What that did to us is create this backlog and therefore lower our cash resolutions over the last couple of years. That is changing. Courts are all open. There's no court that we are active in that still has any COVID-related delays or restrictions. You see courts making valiant efforts to work their way through those backlogs. What that is doing for us is showing a meaningful increase in portfolio velocity. We've given you various data points in the earnings releases, ranging from the number of case milestones that are on the calendar for 2023, which is a multiple of the number that was on for 2022. Also just our first quarter results, which came in at, you know, a fairly eye-popping level of $475 million of consolidated revenues. That is something that you're seeing, really a combination of that backlog picking up, as well as, you know, just the normal activity in litigation that has commenced more recently. We're excited about what is happening in the portfolio after a couple of years of doldrums. We're similarly excited about the new business that we have been able to do. We continue to see demand for our capital in the market, and we also continue to tweak our capital structure so that we can maximize for equity shareholders, the exposure to our highest returning assets. We've got very solid liquidity, a substantial pool of cash available for investing, and as I said, we're looking forward to seeing what 2023 brings. If we turn the slide, this slide just attempts to remind everybody about the four we call the four pillars of value that shareholders get from a position in Burford. To begin with, we have a robust core portfolio that is now stands at more than $6.5 billion of litigation assets. That portfolio has continued to grow nicely, and as we just discussed, we see resolutions in that portfolio really accelerating, while at the same time we've been successful in maintaining consistent returns over that portfolio for a number of years over a very long, a very significant now amount of cash realizations, more than $2 billion in cash that we've returned. We also have the industry's leading origination platform. In addition to that pool of existing assets, we are capable of generating new assets every year, given our market presence and size and the demand for capital that we see in the market. In each of the last 2 years, we've done more than $1 billion in new business. While we favor investing from our balance sheet, especially when we are dealing with high return assets, we also run the industry's largest asset management firm. That asset management capital, which is around $3.5 billion of AUM, that asset management capital allows us to serve client needs more broadly, including with investment strategies that we might not find attractive with balance sheet capital, but that cement our relationship with clients, and expand the reach of what we can do in the industry. That, of course, generates asset management income for us over time, and you really see that number starting to move along with the resumption of portfolio velocity. Finally, sort of separate and apart from our day-to-day business, we've got the YPF case, which is a particularly large and notable case, where on the last day of March, we were successful after some years of litigation in obtaining a federal court, a U.S. federal court, decision in our favor on liability. There are a couple of remaining damages issues to sort out. Argentina has conceded that the ultimate judgment in that case should be in the range of $6 billion-$16 billion, of which, you know, some not insubstantial portion would ultimately accrue to Burford's benefit. Those are really the four value pillars to Burford. Let me now turn the slide and dig in a little bit more deeply to a couple of things. Many of you have seen this slide before, I put it up just as a fundamental reminder of the business model. This is back to the conveyor belt analogy. If you read this from left to right in the graphic, you know, we start off by committing cash to cases. We deploy most of that committed cash over time, then we wait. We wait for the litigation process to take its course, for that conveyor belt to do its work. That ultimately leads to the three kinds of outcomes that you see here on the slide. The most common outcome is settlement. Settlements are a lovely litigation response because they are both riskless in the sense that the litigation risk has been removed from the equation. They generate positive cash flow, as you can see from the returns here, and they do that in a relatively rapid period. When we don't settle and we go to trial, then litigation risk takes hold, and sometimes we'll lose cases when courts or juries don't agree with our view of the facts or the law. We win much more often than we lose, as you can see. Even though winning takes longer than settling, when we do win, we make a lot of money doing it. That's what the combination of those things is, what leads to the aggregate cash-on-cash returns that you see on the right-hand side of that, of that slide. If we turn to the next slide... If we turn to the next slide, this slide here is an effort to show you effectively what's going on with the portfolio on a vintage-by-vintage basis, and really the impact of the COVID delays. What this is showing you for each annual vintage, in other words, the year in which we commenced the investments, it's showing you what has been concluded and realized. More significantly for my purpose, in these hashed black and white areas, it's showing you what is remaining in those vintages. Given that litigation isn't, you know, it's not fast, but it's not endlessly slow either, you would expect to see more of those vintages in the middle of the slide at this point to be concluded than you have. You see quite a lot of activity there, because it's not only that we had this COVID backlog show up, it's also that that happened as the business was starting to really grow rapidly. We have the dynamic of vintages becoming much larger and at the same time not showing the realizations that you would expect from the passage of time. You know, you would expect, frankly, if you hadn't had COVID, the middle of this slide by now should look more like the proportions that you see on the left-hand side. That's the catch-up. That's the backlog that we are now seeing begin to be cleared. What that leads to is a, you know, a reasonable likelihood that over the next couple of years, you're going to see the potential of supernormal outcomes and cash realizations as that backlog gets cleared. That's the exciting part, you know, effectively the worth waiting for part, if you will. The next slide just sets out where we are today with respect to YPF. As I said earlier, we have won on liability in the trial court. There needs to be a further hearing on a couple of damages issues before the court sets a final judgment amount. We believe that that hearing is likely to occur in the last week of July. After that, the judge will go and write her final decision and issue a final judgment. We'll be done with the trial court part of this. We'll have a judgment for a sum certain against Argentina, and that will then open the next phase of this case, which basically is likely to be sort of simultaneously Argentina appealing that result in the U.S. federal courts and us having the ability to begin the enforcement strategy. I know that there are a number of questions about YPF, and so I will hold off talking any more about it until we get there. That really takes me to just where we're wrapping up here for the final slide, which is sort of back to where we began. The fundamental message being that, we're really excited about what we think we will see in the forthcoming few years as the courts normalize and as we get the benefit both of seeing that significant growth in the prior years start to come through in terms of realizations, while also seeing the newer business that we've done follow its normal litigation course as well. With that, why don't we turn to some questions? Thank you, Chris. Our first question comes from Bruce Anderson. Given the strong start we've made in the first quarter, is there every chance that even excluding any further contribution from YPF, from a realized income standpoint, 2023 could well be our best year ever? Well, as Bruce knows, I don't like to forecast the future beyond what I've already done. I know that is a frustration for some of you who are accustomed to companies giving some more forward guidance. There's really no way to do that responsibly here without simply because of the idiosyncratic nature of the underlying assets. That being said, you know, I stand by what I said earlier, which is that the portfolio is seeing velocity. We're seeing a number of milestone events, at a level of volume that we have not seen for the last several years. Milestone events in litigation tend to cause, you know, movement in cases. They can provoke settlement, they can ultimately lead to actual judicial decisions. We are certainly seeing, as we saw in the first quarter, you know, unrealized gains in the portfolio from positive litigation outcomes, and then, hopefully turning those unrealized gains into realized gains and the production of cash. I'm certainly not going to disagree with Bruce's question. Our next question comes from, Martin Divine. How does the current level of identified or introduced opportunities compare with pre-pandemic conditions in terms of number and scale? Well, I think one thing that is particularly exciting is the continued rise in corporate monetization activity. This is a theme that we've touched on before. You know, the business obviously has two basic flavors of investments. The first is when we're addressing a business's P&L needs. Businesses don't want to be spending the money on legal fees and legal expenses and have those payments run through their P&L as operating expenses. They would prefer a world in which we shoulder those costs, and they effectively pay us with a portion of the ultimate outcome of the case. Those transactions tend to be smaller, because you're bounded by the total amount of legal fees paid, although it's still a highly desirable business. The other piece of the equation is the balance sheet side, where businesses don't have, don't really get any market value from holding their own litigation assets. You know, many, many of you are active investors in things, you know, far beyond Burford, and I dare say that none of you probably know because companies don't disclose it in their accounts, know very much about what affirmative litigation the other companies that you're invested in might have. For all you know, there are, you know, very valuable assets sitting there that are just not doing anything in terms of shareholder value. You know, we have a public case study that shows this, shows this now example, which is a company called Sysco, a Fortune 100 US company that's a large food distributor. Sysco is a plaintiff in a number of large, valuable, antitrust cases in the United States. Those cases are nowhere in Sysco's accounts. There's no asset value associated with them, and I don't believe Sysco is getting any market value for their existence. Sysco, quite cleverly, you know, use the collateral value of those cases to secure $140 million in financing from us, which it used to bolster its own liquidity and enhance its ability to have access to operating funds. The fact that companies are sort of moving from, if you will, litigation finance 101, the P&L side, to litigation finance 201, is certainly good news in terms of further opportunities on our ability to deploy capital. Thanks, Chris. There's a follow-up question from Martin. Is increasing competition having any impact on your pricing when looking at opportunity? Well, I'm not sure that I necessarily agree with the premise of the question, that competition is increasing. You know, this asset class has been characterized by having robust competition for quite a long time. If you think about the other significant players that we bang into on a regular basis, you know, many of those firms are now, you know, well over 10 years old. It is not as though we have been operating, you know, in a competition-free zone for some years, which is only now starting to change. You know, there's robust competition here, and there always has been. That being said, you know, this is not commodity capital, and we compete on more than just price. You know, we add real value to our clients beyond just fulfilling their capital needs. We routinely are told that we've secured assignments, we've secured investments when we were not the lowest cost capital provider, but where the totality of what we bring to the table contributed real value from the client's perspective. Our next question relates to AI. It comes from Sean Jahan. Can you provide an example of one or more tangible benefits Burford is seeing as the usage of AI increases? Yeah, I think AI, and I talked about this in the first quarter earnings call as well. AI, really, from our perspective, fits into two different buckets. First of all, there's the impact on our business of AI. We have, as many of you know, been investing meaningfully in data science for some years now, and we have developed a meaningful competence with sophisticated data science, which is only continuing to improve as we layer in yet more machine learning and traditional AI concepts. We use that actively in our investment process, both in terms of including a meaningful quantitative and data science aspect to making investment decisions in the first place, you know, that relies, among other things, on our significant pool of proprietary data. We continue to use those tools in the management of our portfolio after we have made investments. That's an area that we, that we expect to continue to expand. You know, when I was referring in response to the prior question, to the kinds of things that, you know, go beyond commodity capital when we talk to clients, this is clearly one of them. You know, we have what we believe is the leading proprietary data set about commercial litigation in the industry. We make extensive use through our data science of the information that we have. That is interesting to clients. There's value there that goes beyond us just writing a check. The other side of AI is that AI has already disrupted and will continue, in my view, disrupting elements of legal practice, and that disruption likely is favorable for us. The most notable immediate consequence is that the kind of litigation that we do historically needed to be done by the big law firms, because only those law firms had the teams and the resources necessary for the kind of high volume, complex work that goes into large dollar complex litigation. Now, with the greater ability to use AI-style tools, we can in fact, go and have disruption of that marketplace so that smaller firms are now competitive with larger firms. You've seen a rise in new firms, in litigation boutiques, often people that have spun out of the big firms. There is now a larger pool of potential clients for us to finance, and some of those firms can more efficiently attack litigation that might not be being brought, and so broaden our own funding opportunity set. You know, the research that we regularly do tells us that it is not at all uncommon for corporate clients not to pursue all of the viable cases that they have. Typically, that's an economic motivation. They simply don't have the budget to do so. If we can make it, you know, more easy for those cases to be brought without necessarily having to engage the superstructure of a giant law firm, that just continues to expand the market opportunity. I'm excited by and a big fan of the, of the potential of technology in our business. Our next question comes from Peter Thompson. I understand the year-end delay with the accounts and the knock-on effect on the first quarter results timing. For the second quarter and thereafter, are you able to commit to a more prompt reporting of results? Let me set a little bit of context for this. We are still in the middle of what I would characterize as a journey, that will end up with us becoming a full U.S. market issuer as well as, of course, maintaining our U.K. listing. We are a fair bit of the way there on the U.S. side, but we're not entirely there. Part of the reason is because we are still not at the 50% mark of U.S. shareholders. When we cross that 50% mark, which is something that we test for once a year at the end of June, and so we'll know in the next couple of months if we've passed it for 2023, we move to this full U.S. issuer status. We would then be obliged to issue quarterly reports, and to do so on a faster timescale than the timescale to which we're subject today. The current status is that we are voluntarily doing quarterly reporting, but we're not required to do so. And we said that we would do so starting in 2023, you know, as part of our move to access the U.S. public debt markets. We're sort of in this hybrid role, where we are both, you know, as you, as you can see, you know, continuing to build the reporting processes to have those full quarterly reports. I don't today have a target date for each quarter's reporting in 2023. And by the way, as a footnote, there's slightly more complexity in our quarterly reporting this year because we weren't reporting quarterly last year, and so we have to go back effectively and recreate, the comparative quarters to be able to report against. We have had a, you know, sort of a flat-out pace between the, you know, the revised valuation policy, the first quarter numbers, which we needed to get out so that we could enable a debt offering and now the finance work around the debt offering that's in the market. As I said, I don't, I don't have a date, but, we will... As you get into 2024, I think that you will see this on a more regular cadence. It's entirely possible that we will be able to put out a, you know, sort of a conventional U.S.-style IR calendar. You'll need to give us just a couple more quarters to get all of the sand out of the gears. There's a follow-up question from Peter, in relation to Sysco, Chris. Are you able to tell us how things stand with Sysco and the potential settlements of claims? Well, if potential settlement of claims means the underlying claims. Sorry, let me step back and just be clear about what's happening there. Sysco, as I said earlier, is a plaintiff in a number of large antitrust cases. I won't bore all of you with the history of how we got to where we are, but suffice it to say that Sysco made a couple of corporate mistakes, corporate control mistakes along the way, assigned away a bunch of our collateral, and then ultimately we needed to restructure our deal around that. That has led to a degree of misalignment between us and Sysco, which ultimately led to a spat over whether the settlements of that collateral were adequate. We have won the various proceedings that have been adjudicated so far, and the next stage in that process, as it continues to unfold, is a final arbitration hearing, which I believe is in November. That just relates to the relationship between us and Sysco. The underlying antitrust cases are simply continuing to move through the litigation process, you know, effectively on the conveyor belt. Our next question comes from Andrew Ing. How likely will Argentina pay the judgment? In other words, how certain is it that Burford will collect on the YPF judgment? Maybe I'll start the YPF discussion with the same kind of health and safety warning that I gave in the conference call a few weeks ago. I obviously understand that there is an enormous amount of investor interest in this case, in part because it's big, and in part because it's public, and therefore it's something that people can sink their teeth into, as opposed to some of the other cases in our portfolio where there's no public mention of them and therefore no opportunity to do that. That being said, our approach to YPF just cannot be any different than our approach to any other piece of pending litigation. This is ultimately in the best interests of shareholders, of which, you know, John and I are obviously joining you in that category. I know that people would like to know more than we have been able to say, but we're just not in a position to be open about our assessments of strategy, our approaches, you know, anything about timing or anything like that. We couldn't do that in any other case. We can't do that in YPF either. You know, I think the obvious answer to the question is that we wouldn't have done the investment and litigated for 8 years unless we believed that we would be successful in turning, you know, an ultimate judgment into a recovery just in the same way that we've been successful in basically every other investment that we've succeeded at. In terms of how we are going to do that, I'm afraid that has to remain within the, within the cone of the legal teams and not subject for public consumption. Moving on to law firm equity. A question from Martin Divine: What has been the success or otherwise and longer-term potential of the equity investments in the law firm you made? Is there scope and a desire to expand this area? Yes, there absolutely is. I think the question is just about how rapidly the market will move. You know, the current state of play is that in the U.K., it has been acceptable for quite a long time now, going on 15 years, for law firms to have non-lawyer owners. Whether that's by listing them on an exchange and going public, whether that's by taking private equity capital, whether that's by taking capital from us, all of that has been grist for the mill. It has been, unfortunately, you know, not particularly robust in its success. As you know, there are not very many listed law firms in the U.K., and the ones that are listed tend to be smaller and using the listing to expand into other kinds of businesses. You haven't seen any movement from, what people call the Magic Circle law firms, the really big law firms, towards public listings or controlled transactions or private equity transactions. It's a slow-moving market in London. I would venture to say that part of that is because of regulatory overreach in the U.K. you know, we've had the unfortunate experience of, you know, taking this excellent idea, you know, positioning the U.K. as really world-leading in opening up the markets. I think people at the time, including me, by the way, thought that maybe we were going to see a law version of the finance Big Bang of the 1980s, and really catapult London into the lead. Unfortunately, the regulatory process involved in doing this in the U.K. is cumbersome and byzantine, and not really fit for purpose. There have been a variety of reasons, but that's probably a part of them that has caused, you know, just not very much growth. What you now see is the U.S. having some interest in moving in this direction. Arizona is the first U.S. law firm to permit these kinds of structures. Utah is moving along behind it, but you haven't yet seen that kind of activity in, you know, the states like New York and California. This in the U.S., by the way, is a state law issue. It's not a federal issue. Each of the 50 states will have their own approach to this. That all is a long-winded version of saying, we think that law firm equity is a significant and important future part of our business. It is not today a currently important part of our business because there's just not scale, although the deal that the question refers to has been perfectly satisfactory, and we're certainly happy to do more of them. Okay. A question on commitments and deployments. It comes from Kay Tran. We know that COVID has affected realizations, but were commitments deployments affected by COVID, and how so? They were especially deployments, because what you saw with COVID was the, you know, to sort of maybe overuse my conveyor belt analogy, you saw the conveyor belt stopping. And therefore, there were any number of cases where nothing much was happening, and therefore, we weren't deploying our historical levels of capital because the lawyers simply weren't doing any work. As I said, that's all come back to life. I was talking earlier about case milestones. Those are really court-driven. The other thing that is certainly back to life is the pre-court conveyor belt. When you file a piece of litigation, you don't just rush into court. There's a whole lot of process that occurs just between the parties and the lawyers. without any or very much involvement of the court, you know, parties exchange documents, they take depositions of witnesses, and so on. All of that is expensive, and that also slowed or stopped during COVID. You do see deployments resuming now because the whole system is back in operation. Moving on to fair value, a question from Keith Billinghurst: "I'm concerned about mismatch between the high rates of return on concluded cases and the discount rate applied in the calculation of present values of ongoing assets. If the discount rate is less than the return Burford expects, every case taken on will show a day one uplift in its value. How do you avoid this happening? Well, so... Maybe, Rob, we can put up the slide that I think is in the back of the deck, that shows the fair value components, and maybe even the one past that, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah. Okay. You know, if you look at the, if you look at the bar, the stacked bars in the middle of this slide, what you see there is that much of the amount above the cash outlay sits in what's called the litigation risk premium. Just to, just to recap, and let's maybe go back one slide, and then I'll come back to this slide. The old way that we did this was at the top of this slide. If we put $100 out the door in a case, that $100 was the cost, and that's what was carried on the balance sheet. Then in the next year, the red box, we put another $100, so now we've got $200 of cost carried on the balance sheet, and we would just sit there. Then the blue box is when something happened, when there was some judicial decision that would cause a change in the, in the value, and we would increase the value. So the only time that we were increasing value was in that blue box when we had, when we had an event. If you go back now to the slide we were on before, that blue box is basically now divided up between the 77 you see there in gray and the 23 that you see there in red. Most of that 77, the considerable majority, operates exactly the same way. That 77 doesn't come into income until there is an objective case event that causes valuation change. The only difference with this mechanism. That, you know, is showing that is where most of the future gain is absorbed. Really, the only difference in this approach is that 23. What that 23 is going to do is, over time, come into income, and move around a little bit based on interest rates and so on. When you step back and think about it, while we for years didn't do that, you know, mostly because we were trying to be very conservative about this, and, you know, we didn't want, you know, we didn't want a world where we were accreting income, without having court gains. The reality of the matter is that, you know, our assets are worth more as time passes, even if there hasn't been a litigation event. You know, if something comes along and offers me, you know, behind door number 1, 10 litigation cases, all of which were just commenced yesterday, and behind door number 2, 10 litigation cases that were all commenced 2 years ago, and none of the cases have had any events. They're all just going through the process, and they're all of comparable quality. You'd clearly pay a bunch more for the cases behind door number two, because they are considerably closer to reaching a realization. So, you know, I think we've joined the ranks of, you know, everybody else in the financial world, that does use some time value of money as part of their valuation process. That's why I think we've had very few questions about this new approach from institutional investors, because now we look normal to everybody. We, you know, we're the same as BlackRock and KKR and CVC and everybody else, and we just go ahead and do our valuations. So I, you know, I said in the call before that I was looking forward not to talking about fair value very much anymore, and that's actually come true for me. I think people have accepted this and moved on. We don't have the day one valuation adjustment that you're talking about, because we don't have the day one, you know, case result hit. That $77 is sitting there, not coming into income until there's a case event. Please, can you let us know whether the SEC has signed off the revised fair value approach in the 2022 final accounts? If not, when is this likely, and what is the chance the SEC disagrees with the new accounting approach? They haven't yet, in part because there's, I think, no particular urgency from their perspective in doing so. The way this process works, for those of you not familiar with it, is that at least once every 3 years, the SEC does a full review of every public company's accounts. This isn't something special here. That review happens over time. You know, you exchange letters with the SEC, the various questions that they have, you resolve their questions, and ultimately they close their review, and at that point, all of this becomes public. You will be able to read all of the letters back and forth. They're filed publicly 30 days after the review is closed. It's not over yet, but, you know, as we've been pretty clear about saying, we worked extensively with the SEC to arrive at this approach. We're happy with this approach. We believe they are as well, and not only that, we believe this sets a new standard, a new accounting standard for the industry, which we're quite pleased to have been involved in creating and sponsoring. I'm feeling good about where we are. A couple of questions, on the valuation. The first from Bruce Anderson. Given that the first quarter results were uniformly good and much better than might have been reasonably expected, to what do you attribute the market's lukewarm reaction to them, as seen by the weakness in the share price since they were announced? Well, you know, it's funny. I've always been told, and particularly told by U.K. brokers, that investors don't like it when companies talk about their share price. People like to ask me about the share price. You know, look, I think the reality is that while we put out very, very good results, you know, the proof is in the pudding when it comes to generating the cash. Those results showed that we were on a very positive trajectory towards generating the cash. You know, we still need the cases to finally realize and pay. If I were guessing, that's probably where my guess would be. You know, I have to add as a footnote, it is not as though the share price performance over the last several months has not been, shall we say, pleasant to witness. Peter Johnson asks, "I remain very impressed by the company's performance, but not so the share price. What reasons do institutional investors share with you for being reluctant to invest? I don't know that I see institutional investors as being reluctant to invest. You know, that being said, there, you know, look, there are some institutional investors who are not going to invest in this asset class just because of what we do. Once you leave those investors behind, you know, we are widely held across, you know, lots of brand name, traditional, long-only institutional investors. I think the question isn't an unwillingness to invest. I think the question is, you know, you know, it's a business, obviously, that has lumpy and unpredictable revenue, it doesn't fit the traditional mold of, you know, predictable and earnings that can come with forward-looking guidance. We have the benefit of being the market leader, but at the same time, that leaves us effectively in a category of one, right? It's not like there are meaningful public comps that people can look at and choose among us. You know, we really... There are a couple of other public players, but we completely dwarf them in terms of our size and scale, so that's not really a fair comparison. You know, we are not... I guess I would say we are not a must-own stock. You know, if you're a portfolio manager, it's pretty hard for you not to own, you know, any technology stocks. Whether you own a legal finance stock or not, I think is a matter of inclination. One of the things that we have been enjoying with the success of the U.S. listing is being able to go and make the case to a number of new investors. We've moved the size of the shareholder base from, you know, when we first had that listing, we've probably added, you know, somewhere around 20% of the shares are now incrementally held by U.S. investors. We're well into the high 40s%. You've seen, you know, significant upticks in liquidity on the New York Stock Exchange as well. I think this is all a journey as opposed to something that happens, you know, that happens overnight. obviously, it was unhelpful to that journey, to have two years of, you know, very slow resolutions and realizations because of COVID. You know, I think everybody intellectually understands what happened in COVID and realizes that it isn't a reflection on our business, but it doesn't change the fact that, if you're, if you're very quantitative, you know, you might well like to actually see some more cash first. You seem to have generated roughly three-quarters of the expected results for 2023 in the first quarter. Are your expectations for the full year still in line with consensus expectations? As I said earlier in response to Bruce's, Bruce Anderson's question, we don't guide. We don't provide forward guidance, we don't have public expectations about the full year. I'd also suggest that there aren't any consensus expectations for this business. You know, the analysts make it clear in their write-ups that they, too, are not able to predict the business on a quarter-by-quarter or even year-by-year basis. To the extent that you see numbers in the market, I don't regard those numbers as consensus of really anything. I think the way you'd have to look at this business is to look at the data points, look at the size of the unresolved portfolio, look at, you know, the kind of information that is available publicly about, speed to resolution of matters, and look at historical returns and make certain assumptions based on those things. This business does not lend itself to, you know, quarter-by-quarter, earnings projections. Do you think a YPF-sized case was a one-off thing, or do you think it's possible we'll see another in the future from the portfolio? I certainly hope so. You know, the reality in litigation is that case size is really sort of outside of parties' control in many, in many ways. In other words, we don't go out there and say, you know, "Oh, we only do billion-dollar cases." We get people who bring us cases that might ultimately be billion-dollar cases. It's, you know, it's sort of whatever size dispute you happen to have before you at that time, that's what we, that's what we look at, as long as they're of a reasonable size. We always keep our eye out for interesting opportunities like this, when we see them, we do our very best to facilitate bringing them into the portfolio. Two questions on capital management, one from Hiten Mehta and another from Marcel Schober. I'm going to merge them. How are you thinking about capital allocation? Would you consider share repurchases if more cash could be generated than can be redeployed? Well, in terms of capital allocation in general, you know, we've been very clear about our approach to favoring the highest returning assets. If you look at the way that we use investment funds to augment our balance sheet capital, we've divided the world up into 3 buckets of anticipated return. The, the highest bucket of return, you know, above 20% IRR, is the place where we devote most of our capital. For every deal that falls into that bucket, we today take 75% of that deal on balance sheet, and 25% of it goes to the sovereign wealth fund, with an economic arrangement that is quite favorable for the balance sheet. As you start to drop into lower return buckets, you know, the next bucket is 12%-20%, we take 80% of those investments from investment fund LPs and only 20% from the balance sheet. When you go below 12% into the final bucket, we take nothing from the balance sheet at all. It's 100% from funds. That's our approach to capital allocation generally. We believe, you know, we believe in a world where we recycle a lot of our capital into new investments. We pay a modest dividend, as you know. You know, we have today demand for our capital that outstrips the portfolio's cash generation, which is why you see us raising debt to augment our balance sheet capital and our funds on a, on a regular basis. In that context, it would seem to be a pretty difficult argument to favor share repurchases, assuming the current state of the capital today, you know, for two reasons. One is because, you know, we don't have surplus capital. We have client demand for that capital, we would basically be having to dial down client demand, to refuse client demand to do share repurchases. The other thing is, you know, I think that. You know, we had some questions earlier about share price. I didn't talk about trading and liquidity, but certainly, we would benefit from more liquidity in the stock, not less. Given that goal, it seems counterproductive to that goal to turn around and go and reduce still further the float that's in the market. You know, it's a topic that we obviously consider regularly at the Board. We don't have a fixed, immutable approach to it. We have, I think, consistently showed that we're opportunistic about capital structure. But sort of philosophically, I think those two things are difficult to overcome in the business currently. Our final question today, Chris, comes from Peter Thompson, relates to succession. I can appreciate that the CEO and CIO have a long runway ahead of them. However, given their special association with the whole business, what discussions can you share with us about succession? Well, I certainly appreciate the beginning of the question because I too think and hope I've got a long, long runway ahead of me. you know, John and I are the same age. we're both 57, and I think we both love what we do. We love this business, and we're really excited about the future opportunities. neither of us have any plans to do anything other than this in the foreseeable future. but that being said, it's obviously appropriate to always be conscious of risk and therefore of succession. and we, I think, are in a very good place there because we now have, you know, a really deep bench of terrific people at Burford. You know, I think if you go back half a dozen years ago, then maybe you had more key man risk from John and from me. I think that's not the case today. You know, we've developed a significant pool of people, some number of whom have been with us now for many years. You know, we have bands of people who are well younger than we are. And I think there's a deep bench and a deep pool of people for the business going forward. Thank you, Chris. Chris, Sorry, you sound as if you wanted to make a comment. I was just going to say, since we've come to the end of the questions with an astonishing two minutes to spare, I just wanted to return to my theme from the beginning, which is, first of all, to thank all of you for your interest in Burford and your support of us. I know for a number of you, this has been a multiyear journey. We're very grateful for your fortitude, through a variety of unexpected events along the way. I wanted to return to the theme that, you know, we're very excited about what is coming next. You know, it's John said the other day, maybe it was on the earnings call, or maybe it was Jordan. Anyway, one of my colleagues the other day said, "You know, the portfolio was moving at a sufficiently slow pace that you sort of got one email every once in a while about something happening in a case, and now it feels like almost every day something is happening in a case." You know, the mood is very good inside the business. People are excited about what's happening here. I'm really happy to see the portfolio moving and to see courts back to life. Like everything in this business, there will be unpredictability and lumpiness to that. It won't be a nice, smooth curve. You know, the price we all pay for having, you know, pretty high and uncorrelated returns in this business is that lumpiness and unpredictability. If this business were perfectly predictable, then banks would do it, and the returns would be much lower. It's, in fact, because of the unpredictability that we are able to generate the returns that we do. But I'm thrilled with what I'm seeing, and I'm excited about what lies ahead for the months to come. With that, thank you all very much for your time and your attention. Thank you, Chris. I just wanted to thank everyone for taking the time to join us today as well, and to remind everyone that a replay facility will be available shortly after the event via the same link that you used to access the 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. Thank you again for participating. Enjoy the rest of your day.