Nick Rowles-Davies

LFE EDITOR AND REGULAR COLUMNIST

Nick Rowles-Davies is the Editor of Legal Finance Expert. He wrote the key litigation funding text Third Party Litigation Funding in 2014 and has worked in the legal finance industry since the 1990s. Rowles-Davies has been credited with being instrumental in the evolution of the litigation funding industry, from traditional third-party single-case funding to a broad legal and global corporate finance solutions practice.

He served as Chairman of the Commercial Litigation Association from 2019 to 2023 and Director of the Association of Litigation Funders of England and Wales (2014 to 2016).

He is Chief Executive of Lexolent, the world’s first origination network platform for legal finance professionals and a litigation finance fund. Before Lexolent, Rowles-Davies worked senior roles across several of the largest global legal finance companies. He was Executive Vice Chairman of Litigation Capital Management Limited from 2018 to 2021, Chief Executive Officer of Chancery Capital from 2017 to 2018 and Managing Director of Burford Capital UK from 2014 to 2016. With extensive other work in his career, Nick is an admitted solicitor of the Senior Courts of England & Wales and of the Eastern Caribbean (British Virgin Islands).

Articles

The American Patchwork: How Six States Redrew the Rules of Litigation Finance in 2025

Long Read / May 7, 2026

By Nick Rowles-Davies In 2025, at least six US states enacted or materially amended statutes regulating third-party litigation funding. Georgia, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Arizona and Montana each addressed, in different combinations, disclosure, funder registration, foreign funding, funder control and discoverability.1 Indiana and Louisiana belong in the same trend but not in the same cohort: both were 2024 enactments already in force before the 2025 wave had fully developed.2 No two ...

Stephen Hunt Interview: An Insolvency Veteran on Carving His Own Path and Where Litigation Funders Must Improve

April 30, 2026

By Nick Rowles-Davies Legal Finance Expert speaks to the practitioners who shaped litigation funding from the inside. When the question came up of who to interview next, one name surfaced first. Stephen Hunt is a renown insolvency practitioner known for complex and contentious work. His provisional liquidator appointments in the late 1990s shaped both the law and the conventions of that area. He has since led significant cross-border tracing ...

Brussels Blinks: Why the EU Abandoned Harmonised Litigation Funding Regulation and What Fills the Vacuum

Long Read / April 24, 2026

By Nick Rowles-Davies In November 2025, European Commissioner Michael McGrath announced that the European Commission would not proceed with legislation on third-party litigation funding.1 The decision followed three years of institutional work. The European Parliament had passed a resolution calling for regulation by an overwhelming majority in September 2022.2 The Commission had funded a comprehensive mapping study covering all twenty-seven Member States and four non-EU jurisdictions, published in March ...

Litigation Partner Growth – Insight from U.S. & New York Partner Hiring

March 26, 2026

By Nick Rowles-Davies In recent months, Legal Finance Expert has published several articles highlighting just how prominent litigation has become as a promising career in the legal trade. An interesting recent report by H&P Executive Search reflects just how evident this has become from the latest hiring data from the U.S. market. In H&P Executive Search’s latest New York Legal Partner Landscape report, their research designated that the U.S. legal ...

International Arbitration, Litigation Funding, and the Move to Keystone: An Interview with Ben Knowles

March 12, 2026

By Nick Rowles-Davies Following his high-profile move from Clyde & Co together with fellow partners Milena Szuniewicz and Ian Hopkinson, Ben Knowles sat down with Legal Finance Expert editor Nick Rowles-Davies to discuss international arbitration, the structural pressures reshaping large law firms, and the shifting landscape of litigation funding. Ben, you were at Clyde & Co for most of your career, most recently chairing the disputes group. For people who ...
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Mass Torts and the Rise of Third-Party Litigation Funding in the United States

January 27, 2026

By Nick Rowles-Davies Introduction In the modern American legal landscape, the growth of mass tort litigation and third-party litigation finance (TPLF) has converged to reshape the pursuit of civil justice. Once considered a niche mechanism, TPLF has emerged as a multi-billion dollar industry and nowhere is its influence more pronounced, or more contentious, than in the arena of U.S. mass torts. This article reviews some recent scholarly analyses, including ...

The Price of Machine Learning: How a $1.5 Billion Settlement Redefines AI’s Legal Landscape

January 20, 2026

By Nick Rowles-Davies In August 2025, Anthropic did something unprecedented. The AI company agreed to pay $1.5 billion, with preliminary court approval following in September, to settle copyright claims from authors whose books trained its Claude chatbot. At roughly $3,000 per book for an estimated 500,000 works, the settlement represents the first major resolution in the escalating legal battle over whether AI companies can use copyrighted material freely for training ...

The Tokenisation of Litigation Finance: Opening Access to a High-Return Alternative Asset Class

January 13, 2026

By Nick Rowles-Davies How blockchain technology is democratising one of the most lucrative, and exclusive, corners of the investment world. A Market Poised for Transformation The intersection of blockchain technology and alternative investments continues to expand into previously inaccessible corners of finance. Among the most promising frontiers is litigation finance, a multi-billion dollar asset class that has historically been the exclusive preserve of hedge funds, institutional investors, and the ultra-wealthy ...