Tim Follett, Founder & CEO, StructureFlow

Third-party funders are deploying capital into increasingly complex disputes. The structural picture they rely on to assess enforceability, recoverability and risk is often incomplete before commitment and outdated before resolution. I think this is one of the most underpriced risks in the industry, and it is worth being precise about why.

A funder commits on the strength of a structural assessment: who owns what, where the assets sit, how obligations and control are distributed across an entity network. Then the funder waits, sometimes for years, for a judgment it hopes to enforce against that same structure. The assessment is a snapshot, while the structure is a moving target. That distance is where returns get lost.

In my experience this is not primarily a legal analysis problem, but a structural visibility problem. Cognitive overload, fragmented data, and what I call the ‘flux gap’ – the widening distance between how fast organisational structures change and how clearly advisors can track and navigate those changes – are degrading the quality of structural assessment. To put it simply, you cannot reason over what you have not mapped.

Enforcement risk is increasingly a structural risk

High-value recovery failures are not always failures of legal strategy or case selection. Often, they are failures to see how assets, obligations and control sit across an entity network, and how that picture shifts between commitment and judgment.

The English courts have given us a textbook illustration in Lakatamia Shipping v Su. Lakatamia obtained judgments against Mr Su in late 2014 and early 2015 worth approaching US$48 million, a figure that has since grown past US$60 million once interest and costs are counted. The money has still not been recovered. Mr Su held two valuable Monaco villas, not in his own name, but through a chain of British Virgin Islands bearer-share nominee companies: Portview and Cresta. When the villas were sold at auction for over €65 million, the surplus proceeds were routed through a Monégasque lawyer’s client account, onwards to a company called UP Shipping, and then dissipated. Mr Su was committed to prison for contempt for, among other things, failing to disclose his interest in those structures.

That case is not, so far as the public record shows, a funded claim. I use it because it shows the mechanism with unusual clarity. The judgment was sound and the defendant’s liability established. And yet the value moved through a structure of nominee companies and offshore entities faster than the creditor could see and freeze it. For a funder, that mechanism is the risk. A claim can be strong on the merits and still return nothing if the defendant’s structure has been reorganised, layered or relocated in the years between commitment and judgment.

From where I sit, having looked at complex corporate architecture every day, I suspect this is not an exotic fact pattern. It is the daily work of asset-recovery teams, who routinely describe mandates turning on the same thing: businesses restructured through holding companies in Cyprus, the BVI and the Turks and Caicos Islands, or funds moved through Latvia, Andorra and Switzerland before settling in real estate somewhere else entirely. The legal case and the structural case are different questions, but the second one decides whether the funder gets paid.

The due diligence blind spot

Defendant structures are not static, yet the tools used to assess them largely are. Most pre-funding enforceability assessment relies on point-in-time registry searches and document review. While these are undoubtedly useful, and I would never argue against doing them properly at the outset, they share a limitation in that they capture a structure as it was on the day the search was run. They cannot show how assets, obligations and control shift across an entity network over the life of a dispute.

For funders deploying capital into matters that can run for years, that limitation is itself a structural risk. The diligence is sound on day one and progressively less reliable every day after. Nobody re-runs the full picture continuously, because doing it manually is too costly and the cognitive load is too high. So, the funder carries a position priced on a snapshot and exposed to everything the snapshot cannot see. In a case like Lakatamia, the critical movements, the sale of the villas, the routing of the proceeds, happened after judgment and after the creditor thought it had located the assets.

The problem is therefore not diligence as practised, but the format. A written assessment, however rigorous, ages the moment it is signed. What ages less is a model that can be kept current.

The bionic litigator

In my view, the most valuable pre-funding advice in 2026 is developing a live, visual structural assessment of the defendant entity tree, validated and maintained by a team who understands what the structure means for recoverability.

That is a different skill set and a different tool set from what most litigation teams currently deploy. The written opinion answers the question: is this enforceable today? The living model answers a harder and more useful one: how is this structure changing, and what does each change mean for our position? It treats the structure as something you keep watching, not something you check once and rely on.

I am not arguing that technology replaces judgment. The judgment – what a structural change means for recoverability, which entities matter, where the real exposure sits – remains the work of the lawyer. But a lawyer working with a connected, maintained model can see and reason over a structure that no individual could hold in their head, and can see it change in close to real time rather than discovering the change at the point of enforcement. That combination, human judgment over a live structural model, is what I mean by the ‘bionic’ litigator.

The underlying point is simple: litigation finance is, in large part, a bet on a structure holding still long enough to enforce against. Structures do not hold still. Lakatamia took the better part of a decade, and the creditor is still chasing the money. The funders and advisors who treat enforcement risk as a structural visibility problem and equip themselves accordingly will price and protect their positions better than those still relying on a snapshot and hoping it lasts. You cannot enforce against what you can no longer see.