Hello, this is Robert Bailhache, and I run Burford's Investor Relations outside the Americas. I and the whole team at Burford welcome you to today's 2026 retail shareholder audio webcast with Christopher Bogart, Burford's Chief Executive Officer, and Jordan Licht, Burford's Chief Financial Officer. Thank you for your interest and, in many instances, longstanding investment alongside Burford's employee shareholders who own today around 10% of the company. We hope you find this forum useful. Before I hand over to Christopher Bogart, some housekeeping. After some brief opening remarks from Chris, we'll move to Q&A. You can ask a question at any time by submitting it in the Q&A box that you see on the webcast dashboard on your screen. This is discreet to you and us. If you have any technical questions for the production team in our virtual green room, you can use the same private Q&A box for that purpose. We'll try to get through as many questions as possible, but due to the fixed time available, we likely won't be able to respond to each of them. A selection of the questions we've already received are grouped by topic. We plan on getting to each topic that's been raised. If there are any new subjects from the live Q&A feed, we will certainly try to get to those as well. Finally, a replay will be available to registrants a short while after today's event using the webcast registration link you've been provided with. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Christopher Bogart, Burford's Chief Executive Officer. Thanks very much, Rob, and thank you all for joining us today. I really enjoy doing these and interacting with individual investors. We get some of our best questions, and we get some of our most sustained and long-term engagement, as Rob said. A number of you have been on this journey with us for quite some time. It's been 17 years now since we started Burford. We're very grateful for your support and for your interest and for your enthusiasm about the company. As Rob said, we've had a number of excellent questions, I'm not going to go on at any great length in advance. You all had access to the earnings call that we did recently, that's when I gave quite a long presentation about the company, what we were thinking about our market and liquidity position following the YPF decision. To the extent that you haven't listened to that, I would encourage you to do so, and to look at the slides that accompany that, because there was really quite a lot of information there about where we are heading and how we're navigating the dynamics that exist. I would just sound the note, though, that we remain very enthusiastic about the state of the business and the market. This is a growing business and a growing market, and we'll talk with some of the questions about just why that is. We believe, notwithstanding the disappointment that happened in the Second Circuit with YPF and the consequent negative impact on the share price, we believe that there's a lot of future runway here and we're excited about being able to capitalize on it. With that, Rob, maybe we should just go to the questions because you've told me that the many questions you've already received will really cover the waterfront for the kinds of things that I would otherwise take people through. Absolutely, Chris. Let's move straight away to our first area of inquiry, which is around growth. We've obviously had several questions about this topic, specifically the outlook for continued strength in new business, the funding of that growth, and Burford's 2030 growth target. To bring the crux of these together, because we really have had many, and with specific thanks to shareholders Denny Jaspers and Neil Nealon-Crewe, there are three questions. First, what are Burford's growth prospects as we stand today? Second, will organic cash generation be sufficient to meet the funding requirements of this growth? And third, do you still view the doubling of the portfolio base between 2024 and 2030 as achievable? Great. Thank you very much for those questions. What are our growth prospects? Our growth prospects are strong. The business has been growing steadily over time, and really, the catalyst for that growth comes from two places. The first place is that law firms just cannot help themselves from significantly increasing their fees every year. If you look at the large U.S. law firms, what are sometimes called the Am Law 25, which refers to the 25 largest law firms by revenue in the United States or the Am Law 10, you see them both here on the chart that Rob has just put up. You'll see that they have been increasing both their revenue and their profits by double-digit numbers year-over-year-over-year. The way they're doing that, of course, it's not as though these firms are becoming more efficient. They're doing that by raising their prices to their customers. If you are a business and you are needing to avail yourself of legal services, as basically every business in the world does, you are paying more and more every year for what is something that is really collateral to your operating business. That is the fundamental reason that there is a strong market demand for Burford services. Because if you're running a business and you're now confronted with the idea that it's going to cost 10 or $20 million or even more to go and pursue a single claim. We're now seeing claim costs going up to even as much as $50 million. Those kinds of numbers, even for large, well-capitalized businesses, are very distracting from their core business. They would rather take those pretty substantial sums and invest in growth or, frankly, these days, invest in AI, as opposed to investing in litigation. The opportunity to offload those costs onto a specialist balance sheet like the one we have is attractive to companies, and we've seen no pause in the growth of demand for our services globally. I think there are strong growth prospects. That's reason number 1. I said there were two reasons. Reason number 2 is it just makes good sense, especially for public companies, from a public company P&L perspective. Getting legal costs off G&A is a shareholder value-enhancing choice. Paying for legal costs on your P&L is a shareholder value-destroying choice. An increasing number of companies are recognizing that dynamic. The second part of the question, if I remember it correctly, was what is the consequence of being able to fund all of that growth from organic cash generation? The answer to that is, of course, to some extent, a we'll see answer. Months before we had an outcome in the YPF case, and we've said this publicly before, we had moved the business onto a footing that we were no longer going to solve gaps between the resolution of cases and the generation of cash proceeds from, on one hand, and the financing of brand new matters on the other with debt. For several years, what we were doing is we were basically saying, "Gee, we've got a lot of growth coming along, and we really want to do all of that growth. Mostly because of the pandemic, realizations have been slower, we'll close the gap with some debt." We had alerted the team that we had reached the end of our tolerance for doing that with the most recent debt issuance that we did in January. We have been, for a while, moving in the direction of wanting to be self-financing. The question of how that's going to go is really a question of a pretty obvious one. It's a question of what's going to happen in terms of cash inflows in any particular period, and what's going to happen in terms of cash outflows. The good news is that we are completely in control of that dynamic. Just like any other investment vehicle, we can simply not do the next new opportunity that comes to us if we don't think that we have the available cash to finance it. Obviously, we would like to do every desirable opportunity that comes to us, but there's no adverse consequence on the business other than foregoing the opportunity if we feel as though realizations have not kept pace with growth. We're hopeful that we won't find ourselves in that position. As a result, we haven't seen any suggestion at present that we can't continue to fulfill this target that we laid out at Investor Day. Thank you, Chris. Our next question is on the subject of growth and leverage, and it comes from Ilya Efimov. "Following the YPF write-down, leverage metrics increased materially despite substantial liquidity and having no significant debt maturities until 2028. What are your capital allocation priorities for the coming period, including target leverage? What milestones would indicate leverage has returned to a level where you can focus aggressively on value creation rather than balance sheet management? Well, I suppose I don't entirely accept the premise of the question, because I don't think that we have pivoted away from value creation and towards balance sheet management. I think that there needs to be a balance between those things. We would like, over time, to delever the business, and we would like to continue to grow the business. Our hope, and we laid out previously in the Q1 call, our hope is that we will be able to do both of those things. As I just said a moment ago, we have the levers available to us to manage the possibility that there will be timing mismatches along the way. The reality is we've got an enormous portfolio of existing litigation matters, billions of dollars' worth, hundreds and hundreds of cases. The simple fact of the matter is those cases are going through the process. We're not seeing degradations in our loss rate. That implies that those cases will turn into cash. The question simply has been in the business, when is that cash realization going to occur? As we all know, that's been happening somewhat more slowly in the last few years as we've come out of the pandemic with significant backlogs, compared to the pace of the system before the pandemic. I think over time, that has to repair itself, because the simple reality is that our business and civil society, frankly, rely on having a viable court system. If it takes simply way too long to get cases through the court system, that starts to call into question the viability of those dispute mechanisms that are really essential to the functioning of business and civil society. I don't think this is a sustained long-term issue, I do think it's an issue in the current year, I think it's an issue in the immediate future. We'll just have to manage through that by being prudent on both sides. Jordan, do you have anything you'd like to add there? Sorry, Chris. No. I think, the simple answer, with respect is this is, as you mentioned before, in the answer to the first question, which is, we never operated the business with a day in which YPF was going to resolve, or with respect to using the YPF cash flows to address the capital structure, in the immediate term. When you think about how we operate going forward, obviously, there is a constraint on the incremental leverage, but that wasn't something we were planning to do to begin with. As the business continues to perform, the generation of cash flows as well as the building of the book and retained earnings will bring the actual GAAP leverage number back into normalization. Thanks, Jordan. The next question is actually related to realizations, and also comes from Ilya Efimov. Many investors understand Burford's value depends on the conversion of portfolio assets into cash rather than on any large single matter. Can you help us understand how you view the pace of realizations in cash generation over the next 12-24 months? Specifically, what key indicators should shareholders monitor to determine whether the portfolio is performing as expected? Thanks. I think that there are a few things that I look at, which include obviously the pure actual amount of cash that we're generating from investments. I look at the weighted average life of matters, both the concluded weighted average life and also the weighted average life of active deployed capital. You'll see that those numbers have moved up slightly. That's because the portfolio is so large, that even slight movements require a fair bit of underlying activity. The fact that you've seen those numbers move up, is certainly suggestive that there is delay going on in the system. What we do is, we don't look at this on an aggregate basis when we operate the business internally. We get to an aggregate number by literally going case by case and assessing in each particular case what the prospects are of that case moving towards an ultimate realization during the period that we're analyzing. The problem with that, and I call it a problem, but bear in mind that the reason a number of people are invested in Burford is because our cash flows are uncorrelated to markets. Not only are our cash flows uncorrelated to markets, stress in markets is usually good for us on a long-term basis. The price of that lack of correlation is a lack of predictability of our cash flows because we are effectively takers of time. We cannot control time. Often our clients can't control the timing either. As a general truism, plaintiffs are eager to get to a result in their cases. Defendants are eager not to have that happen because getting to a result usually means the defendant is paying money. Bear in mind, the defendant pays money in around 90% of the cases that we do. It's not surprising that you have that tension. On top of that, you've got the operation of the court system. When you have a case that is running through the court system, the question is, A, is the defendant at some point going to decide that it's in its interest to settle that case instead of continuing to litigate? You can see from the chart on the screen that our settlement rate is floating in the high 70s. What that says to you is that most of the time, defendants are going to settle these cases, but the timing of when they do that is in their hands, not in ours. If they don't settle the cases and the 20% of the time that they don't, or sorry, 22% of the time they don't, those cases are going to be subject to whatever is going on in the court's calendar. When can a judge find time on the docket to have enough time for trial? When can the judge find time in their busy lives to go and write the opinions that are necessary? I sometimes use the analogy to try to express delay about four lanes of traffic merging into two, but it's actually a little bit more complicated than that because our cases tend to be larger and more complicated than the average piece of litigation. If you're a U.S. federal judge today, your docket is full of immigration appeals because of the political dynamic in the United States. They're full of criminal matters and so on. All of those matters are much easier and faster to resolve than ours are. An immigration case comes along and says, "Okay, we need a three-hour trial." That's pretty easy to fit into the docket. We come along and we say, "Huh. We need a three-week trial, or we need a three-month trial." That's much harder to fit into a congested docket, and that explains some of the reason that you see this unpredictability. The simple answer is that this stuff will ultimately resolve. As it resolves, it should produce cash because we've got, as you can see here, pretty consistent outcomes. We have a question from Ewo Morx on portfolio returns. Is it fair to expect that the trend of the last four to five years, being a small proportion of adjudications relative to settlements, combined with lower ROIC on adjudications, will continue? Alternatively, do you see reasons why adjudication ROICs should trend back towards the higher levels of the past? What actions is Burford taking or can take to reverse the recent settlement adjudication trend? Well, I don't think there's anything that we can do. Again, we are takers, not creators of the litigation dynamics. The question that we've raised publicly a number of times, though, when you look at the charts up on the screen, you look at the increase in settlement rates. The question is whether is that a permanent change in our portfolio, or is that a temporary change affected by backlog? There's obviously a correlation between settlements and return. If I have a claim for $100 million against a company, I could go to trial, and if I'm successful, I could win $100 million. If I settle the case, there is no way that the defendant company is going to pay me $100 million in settlement. They're going to apply a meaningful litigation risk discount. The settlement value of that case will be materially less than $100 million. The more cases that settle, on the one hand, the lower the returns are compared to going to trial. On the other hand, settlements tend to be faster, and they completely de-risk the case. There are pros and cons to both. Candidly, it doesn't really matter where we sit on the pro and con dynamic because we're not the decision-makers there. Ultimately, the decision of whether to settle or not is a decision that's being made by the defendant more than anything else. Although our client certainly has something to say about that. We'll see where that all ends up, but I don't know the answer today. I would encourage you not to be focused the way the question was on the headline number. The reality is, I'm happy with a higher settlement rate and lower returns because I also am taking less risk, less duration, and I'm turning my capital faster, and I'm happy with cases going to trial because we like the quality of the portfolio. I'm happy with cases going to trial and generating higher returns. Historically, we've had a mixture of both. Thanks. Next question is on duration. Weighted average life of active capital has increased from around 2.3 years historically to 3.4 years today. To what extent is this driven by temporary factors such as court backlogs and slower litigation, compared with a deliberate shift towards larger and more complex cases? More importantly, should investors expect capital duration to trend back to historical levels, or is 3.4 years or better balance the new normal? Well, as I was saying earlier, I think the delay that has crept into the system is unacceptably systemic. It will drive people out of litigating disputes, which is not where we want them to be as a society. You need an effective dispute resolution mechanism. I don't think that it can be a long-term trend. I think courts and governments are going to need, if they can't bring that under control fairly soon, they're going to need to take alternative steps. Those are fairly easy steps to take, right? They involve just hiring some more judges and so on. You've seen that happen in other areas of the litigation system that we don't touch. I referred to U.S. immigration a moment ago. You've seen the government hire a whole batch of new immigration judges. It's certainly the case that if we are seeing systemically unacceptably long durations in litigation, that there are ways to address that structurally. I don't believe this should be a new normal. I also don't think that it's necessarily the case that just because a case is larger and more complex, it necessarily takes longer. I think it's a question, again, as I said earlier, of docket management and availability of resources. There is also not necessarily a correlation between complexity and size on the one hand, and court time on the other. The poster child example of that is YPF. YPF only ever occupied three trial days of court time because the underlying merits of the case were very straightforward. There were legal issues that needed to be briefed. In terms of what needed to be resolved at a trial, which is what really takes up court time, that was quite a straightforward case. Whereas we've seen cases where tiny fractions of the amount at stake compared to YPF would take many multiples of the number of court days because there were complex, contested factual issues. There's not the kind of direct correlation that the question might suggest. Thanks, Chris. We've got a related question, which you've answered in part, Chris, I think it's an interesting one. I'll persevere with it. You can see whether you think you have answered it to the extent you'd like to. It relates to effectively risk asset selection and duration. It comes from Nam Jung Koo. Since the reference to trying a few more Petersen in Burford's 2023 shareholder letter, we would expect the share of definitive commitments to higher risk assets, particularly those in the 25%+ model risk of loss to have increased. As the weight of these assets grows or riskier assets, is there a material possibility that the overall portfolio weighted average life will rise meaningfully above current levels? No. Again, I don't think that you can point to that kind of correlation. That's not how I think about the dynamic. Certainly, we look at those issues when we take on cases. If a client shows up with a case that is very complicated is going to require very significant efforts to take it to trial, It also isn't worth very much money, that's a case that we're less likely to be inclined to do, even if we think the case might be quite strong. On the other hand, you don't often see cases like YPF, where the claim was very straightforward the damages calculation was very straightforward. I think I've sort of largely addressed the point before. Thanks, Chris. Okay, let's take a drill down into the next layer. We've got a question on the protein claims family. It comes from Denny Jaspers. Can management provide a definitive update on the trial timelines for the Sysco antitrust protein cases? If an outsized settlement or treble damages award occurs in late 2026 or 2027, is that single realization large enough to unilaterally cure the current book equity deficit? The short answer to the first part of the question is no. When you talk about the Sysco cases, you're really talking about a series of different proteins. There's chicken, beef, turkey, and pork. Each of those proteins has been assigned by the Multi-District Litigation Panel to a different court. Each of those cases is being supervised by a different federal judge, Each of them is moving at its own schedule. The other thing that makes these kinds of U.S. antitrust cases a little more complicated is that the way these cases tend to start is with a class action. The way class actions work in the United States, and increasingly in the United Kingdom with the Competition Appeal Tribunal, is they happen on what's called an opt-out basis. You start off, one representative plaintiff will get together with one set of lawyers, they will file a case on behalf of every similarly situated plaintiff. Every person who bought bananas in the year 2026, that's going to be a class of people for whatever reason. I'm making this up, obviously. That case will go along, ultimately that class case will proceed to adjudication or settlement, the members of the class will share in the damages that are awarded. However, there is the prospect for individual claimants to opt out of being part of the class and to bring their own parallel proceeding. It's quite common in large U.S. antitrust cases for corporate plaintiffs to exercise that opt-out right. The reason that they do that is that if they have significant damages, they are more likely to be able to achieve a higher settlement level, a higher recovery percentage of those damages than the class will, just because of the vagaries of the way these things are litigated. It's not only that we have four proceedings proceeding in different courts on different schedules, it's also that we have the class cases sometimes proceeding separately from the opt-out cases. For example, in Turkey, there's going to be a trial this fall in the class case, but there's not going to be a trial at the same time in the opt-out cases. In some instances, the opt-out cases actually go back to their home courts to be tried. The whole thing is a reasonably complicated matrix of what's going on. The question really in those cases is there a catalyst that will bring the plaintiffs and the defendants together in some kind of settlement negotiation, or will you need to go through some sort of bellwether style trials where you're trying one or two of these claims to see what juries think of them, to be able to ground a settlement dynamic more reasonably? No pun intended, I think the jury is still out about how and when these cases resolve. Thanks. A couple of questions on YPF. First from Bruce Anderson. How can the Second Circuit decide the YPF case should not be heard in the U.S. courts and ignore the fact that in 2018, the Supreme Court refused to interfere with the Second Circuit's prior decision to allow the case to proceed in the Southern District of New York? Well, if I didn't know otherwise, I would have thought that was a planted question from somebody because it completely expresses my view. I think that the decision was outrageous. I think it was unjustified. Unfortunately, we caught the very low odds but very high impact, idiosyncratic outcome that sometimes occurs in litigation. It seems pretty clear from the face of the judgment that the panel of the Second Circuit was affected by the size of the judgment and its impact on the Argentine economy. That, in my view, colored their legal analysis. I don't think that there's a good way of rationalizing the strands that Bruce just brought together. I think that was quite a poor decision, and it's been the subject of some public criticism. The second YPF question, Chris, is as follows. Following the Second Circuit decision, the firm has signaled a pivot to international treaty arbitration. Given that ICSID proceedings against sovereign nations routinely take upwards of a decade and carry substantial legal fees, what is the specific forward-looking budget allocated to this arbitration, and what is the expected drag on operating margins? Well, again, I think I don't really agree with the premise of the question. Going in reverse order, a couple of points. First, there's no drag on operating margins here because this is an investment in litigation like anything else. It doesn't hit our operating margins as it's happening. Second, every ICSID case is against a foreign sovereign. It's not as though there's a special category, that's all ICSID cases. ICSID cases take an average of 4.4 years to get to an award. By the way, I'm not certainly suggesting that this is a speedy process, but I am suggesting that ICSID proceedings don't take as long as a decade, as a general proposition either. The cost associated with bringing an ICSID arbitration is really squarely in the norm of the kinds of cases that we fund. If I can read the little tiny print here, I think somewhere or other there was something about the average cost of one of these cases. We're talking millions but not hundreds of millions of dollars or even many tens of millions of dollars. I think it's a perfectly rational thing to be doing. Look, to the question earlier, to Bruce's question, what should have happened here, if the Second Circuit was going to end up in this place, is they should have done it in 2018, and we would have been arbitrating, and we would have been done by now. That's the aggravating part of it. We've always contemplated a world in which we might be in arbitration here, and I think it's perfectly supportable by the economics of the case. The next question relates to AI and efficiency. Comes from Gabriel Cazola Person. How is Burford deploying AI? Do you see significant cost reductions? Do you think it could lead to even better returns on capital? As a number of you know, I ran a technology venture capital firm before founding Burford, I am a firm fan of technological advances like what we're seeing out of AI. The recent enhancements in some of the models have been, for legal work, quite extraordinary. Jon Molot and I were both active users of Fable 5 for the few days last week, I guess it was, before the U.S. government closed it down. It was notable that the step change over Opus 4.8 just in that one model evolution. I think you're going to see very considerable additional growth there. What are we doing at Burford? We're doing a number of things. Burford has been engaged in data science and advanced technology for years. When you talk about AI specifically, what we do is, every employee has access to a mainstream AI model, whether that's ChatGPT or Claude. We also have deployed function-specific AI models, things like DeepJudge and Legora for legal activity. We make active use of AI in all sorts of different ways in the business, ranging from assisting with the investment process itself to making the research component of what we do either better or more efficient. I do think that AI has the potential to continue to enhance what we do and increase our profitability. A question on operational efficiency from Peter Richmond. It would be useful if you could say something about the split of costs between running the existing book and developing new business, i.e., the expense of new business strain. How do you think about cost management, including interest expense? Jordan should chime in here as well. We have always been very focused on cost in this business. Our business is a relatively straightforward one. Our costs are largely human cost, with some D&A off on the side. We're conscious of making sure that we are efficient and that we have right-sized our cost base, and we'll continue to do that. You'll hear some more about that from us in the Q2 earnings. In terms of the split of cost between the existing book and new business, that's a harder question because of the way that we operate the business. There are a few people in the business who are devoted solely to new business activities. There are a few people in the business who are devoted solely to managing existing cases. The bulk of our people do both. They build a relationship with a client, they get a deal from that client, or often multiple deals from that client, and they stay involved with that client and with that deal as it goes through the process. It's not as though I'm running a sales organization over here and a management organization over here, and I can point to one box and say, "Okay, well, that's $20 million for sales, and here's another $30 million for management." If you said, "Okay, we don't want to do any more sales," there's $20 million. It's not nearly that easy to unpick. Jordan, do you want to add anything here? No. I've always said one of the allures of our business and how we do retain people is that they are not billing by the hour and tracking every six minutes. It's something that we don't do. I think, Chris, you described uniquely the way in which our business operates. Obviously we are conscious and using internal metrics to understand where we're spending our time and if we're spending our time efficiently. We don't have a public breakdown of new business versus old. Thanks, Jordan. The next topic is valuation. Question from Bruce Anderson. While Burford is larger and stronger than it was before its U.S. listing, with share price halving versus its closing price on the eve of the New York Stock Exchange listing, the company clearly isn't more highly valued after listing in the U.S. In fact, the valuation gap, the difference between the underlying value of the business and the market capitalization, is wider than ever. Why is that, and how do you plan to address it? You're the market more than we are, you're probably better able than I am even to answer that question. I'll give you a few thoughts from my perspective. We have just been through a very dramatic series of events spanning several years now, those events relate to YPF, they had, I think, a profound impact not only on the share price but on the shareholder base of Burford. We've always had this YPF case, it really did not spring into prominence until the case really got going post-pandemic and when it started to look like there was going to be a meaningful award in favor of the plaintiffs. Once that started, in addition to a number of historic, long-only traditional Burford shareholders, our stock started to move a lot into the hands of event-driven investors. That only increased further once Loretta Preska actually rendered her judgment of $16-plus billion, the largest judgment in Second Circuit history. We entered an era where, frankly from my perspective, the underlying value of the rest of the portfolio and the core business really took a back seat to a whole lot of investors who were playing the stock based on Argentina and YPF. Obviously, what has happened is those investors have largely exited in one fell swoop following the Second Circuit's decision. While I regret where the stock price is, Rob said at the beginning, this group of shareholders is roughly equal to the management shareholders. This is something we live with and are very affected by on a day-to-day basis with the team. The task is to refocus the market on Burford, the traditional value of Burford's diversified portfolio, and the cash that it's capable of generating. There was a reference to the New York Stock Exchange listing. We were successful before in getting the market to focus there, I think we have signed up to do the shoe leather work to try to get the market to focus on that again. Thanks. Next question is on dividends. It comes from, actually, a couple of questions, Trevor Griffiths and Colin McPhee. While I agree the priority is to reduce leverage, the probable passing of the dividend, which is being flagged, sends the wrong message to shareholders. Directors and staff have been very well remunerated, shareholders don't seem to be sharing in the successful deployment of their capital. Cutting the dividend feels like shareholders remain very much at the back of the queue. Please comment. Well, the dividend is, I have to say, one of the things, and this is not a recent issue. The dividend for years has been one of the most divisive issues in our shareholder base. We have a number of shareholders, and I think they're probably over-represented in this population. We have a number of shareholders who are dividend-focused. They like dividends. They think that paying dividends is an important thing for companies to do. I don't need to recite for you all of the arguments in favor. We have an equally vocal cadre of shareholders who are strongly opposed to Burford paying a dividend and believe that we get no credit for the dividends that we pay, and that the capital that we are diverting to the dividend would be much better used either by reinvesting in the business or by de-levering. It has been, again, without regard to the events of the last few months, there has never been a way to bridge those dueling viewpoints. What we did for quite some time is pay to try to make everybody as happy or at least as least unhappy as possible. We paid a small dividend that we did not increase. I think when you look around at the level of leverage on the business and the yield of the bonds that leverage implies, which is more expensive than we would like it to be when it comes time for us to go and refinance the debt, which is still some considerable way off, of course. We would like that yield to be lower, and we think that it is a net positive for all equity holders if we can achieve that. To do that means that we want to do some de-levering, and it just to us, while we haven't taken a final decision about this, we've certainly signaled the direction of travel. It just to us doesn't make sense to pay a small dividend for which we're not really getting any credit, as opposed to having the overall equity benefit associated with making that capital available for de-levering. Jordan showed you, I think, a slide last time of the impact of not paying a dividend for a relatively short period of time on the leverage ratio, and we think that's probably a prudent thing to be doing. As I said, we'll come to a landing point on that before the next dividend would otherwise be declared. Question on share buybacks from Lucas Amaro. I understand that the primary strategy is to deploy capital to fund growth with the objective of doubling the portfolio base to $4.8 billion in 2030. However, there must be a valuation threshold at which share buybacks become more compelling. Could you please provide insight on your framework regarding this trade-off and outline any potential plans to capitalize on buyback opportunities? Jordan, do you want to take that one? Sure. Sorry, Chris. Well, look, I think obviously, we have historically talked about the opportunity to buy back shares and to use capital to do that. One of the things we've been consistent about is deploying capital into the business to continue to fund new assets and build shareholder returns in the retained earnings of the business through the asset growth and not taking on leverage to go buy back shares. I think given the question that Chris just previously answered, we do live in a world where there are GAAP covenant levels. I don't want to say never because that would be inappropriate. We do want to make sure that we're in an appropriate position to maintain the capital base. Buying back shares at a certain stock price, while could be attractive, also has the reverse impact on the GAAP leverage covenant levels. We have to be mindful of that in the near term. Okay, thanks. We have two questions on new initiatives from Gabriel Cazola Person and Tom Trudgian. You've mentioned that because non-lawyers aren't allowed to own law firms in most of the U.S., this prevents some business owners from monetizing their lifelong investments. This is painful when the AI revolution will require increased investment to stay in the game. Acquiring law firms at attractive multiples would be a logical step for Burford. Is Burford lobbying for change on U.S. law firm ownership rules? How could Burford exploit such an opportunity? Relatedly, also, how are Burford's investments in law firm PCB Byrne and legal consultancy Kindleworth performing? Taking those in reverse order. PCB Byrne has been a great investment, performed very nicely and continues to do so. Kindleworth is quite a new investment for us, just some months old now, so I think it's premature to talk about how it's performing. We certainly have been enthusiastic about working with the Kindleworth team and seeing the future prospects that that business has. Going to the broader question, are we lobbying? The people who need to do the lobbying and who will be most effective at lobbying for change are the law firms themselves, because those are the people who will be the direct beneficiaries of those kinds of regulatory changes. We will look, I think, frankly, a little bit too much like a grasping capital provider. I think our lobbying message is less potent. Gee, Mr. Legislature, please change the law so that we can make some money here." I think that there is widespread discontent with the current capital structure of law firms. Jon and I both have said publicly for some time that we think that structure will change over time, just like the structure of other industries has. Law firms today are effectively identical in structure to investment banks a few decades ago. Investment banks today are of course not even recognizable, compared to their structural roots. I firmly believe that you're going to see change dynamics like that occur in the large global law firms as well. I think it really is just a question of time and momentum. I don't think that it's a this year thing. I don't even think it's a next year thing. I also don't think that you're going to look out a decade or two and have the same law firm structures that you see today. I think that's just going to ultimately move, and I think we are very well positioned. As what is effectively the largest capital provider to the legal industry today, I think we're very well positioned to be able to continue to meet the capital needs across the legal spectrum. We might meet those needs with different structures. I get a lot of questions about why would you divert balance sheet capital to investing in a lower returning law firm deal than a higher returning litigation finance deal. I'm not necessarily suggesting that we're going to do that we're going to take half of our balance sheet and put it towards law firm investments. I think that we have a unique market position that will enable us to capitalize on profit from what I think is an inevitable trend. We have a question from Jonathan Welham on regulation. Given the growth and interest in legal finance, is Burford well-positioned for potential increases in regulation, such as the recent push The federal legislation in the United States to mandate transparency of funding and restrict funders from directing settlement strategies. Well, I think that we have always lived in a world of a degree of regulation. Law is a regulated industry. Unlike lots of regulation, it's tightly regulated by judges. If you think about it, if you compare law and securities, for example, securities regulation happens on a sort of audit basis. It's not like every securities transaction is reviewed by a regulator, but every piece of litigation is reviewed by a judge. I think there has always been a level of regulation that has worked just fine. I'm not particularly concerned by the concept of additional regulation, and I would sort of quarrel a little bit with calling the push recent. There's been a push for further U.S. regulation by corporate defendants for literally Burford's entire existence. It hasn't amounted to very much since 17 years ago. Thanks, Chris. Our next question, looking at the hour, probably this will be our final question, Chris, is on international growth. It comes from Peter Richmond, it's as follows: as a global business, could you comment on Burford's international market plans and your views about the optimal level of geographic diversification for the business? Sure. Burford is indeed a global business. The reason that we are a global business is because our client base is global. When I talk about our client base, I mean not only the individual corporate clients that we serve who are located all over the world, but the law firms that represent them. Those law firms increasingly are structured as multinational organizations. This is a trend that has been around for a number of years, and it's a trend that we have adapted the business to meet. What I mean by that is, really going back more than well over a decade, we've designed our business to be able to meet the needs of the large global law firms wherever it is that those needs arise. We can do every kind of law that they do, we can deploy capital for them in every place that they're active. They're not active in every jurisdiction. The big law firms don't have offices in Chad, for example. We don't do any business in Chad as a result. They certainly do do business in the places where we're present, and we continue to expand to meet those needs. Madrid being the most recent example of that, where we have one person on the ground in Madrid and another one on the way there, a transplant from Burford in New York. Spain has basically welcomed in the branch offices of the large global law firms, as well as continuing to have Spanish firms. That means that when we go to one of our traditional client relationships, they have the expectation that if a partner from Madrid calls up with a client in tow, that we'll be there to serve that client in just the same way that Morgan Stanley is there to serve a Spanish client who wants to go public or wants to raise capital. That's really how we think about it. I don't have in my mind a sort of allocation that says, "We want to be 40% U.S., 20% U.K., and 40% rest of world." I think that number ebbs and flows depending on what's going on at any given time. There is more litigation that could be going on in continental Europe of the kinds of things that we have historically done right now than there has been for some years. Is that a trend or is that a blip? We'll see. You get blips like that all over the place. We just design ourselves to be able to provide service to the law firms that are our clients. Rob has told me we have to bring this to an end. My gosh, what a thorough and thoughtful collection of questions. We're really grateful for that, for the extent to which you follow the business, the extent to which you keep us on our toes, and for your support as we work through a set of share price challenges that are very front of mind for us to address with a very large and growing portfolio. Thank you again for your time, your interest, and your support. Thank you, Chris. If I could just issue one reminder, which is replay facility will be available shortly after the event via the same webcast registration link that you used to access today's audio webcast. As always, we encourage you to reach out to us with any follow-up questions through the usual channels, or you can email ir@burfordcapital.com. Thank you again for participating, enjoy the rest of your day.