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 Cross-Undertaking as an Asset

Long Read / September 3, 2026

Why the promise standing behind a freezing order is the least examined part of it The order of 28 August By Nick Rowles-Davies On 28 August 2026 the Commercial Court gave an FCA-regulated introducing broker permission to enforce a cross-undertaking in damages and ordered an inquiry into the losses caused by a freezing injunction that had been wrongly obtained.[i] The facts are ordinary enough to be useful. Apollo XI Limited, ...

Before the Flood, Again: The American Lobbying Campaign Behind Fair Civil Justice

Long Read / August 24, 2026

How a U.S. Chamber campaign acquired a British name and turned the failure of a retail debt issuer into an argument against litigation funding By Nick Rowles-Davies On 20 August the Financial Conduct Authority warned consumers about unregulated loan notes and mini-bonds, citing the failure of Woodville Consultants, a litigation funder that had raised retail capital through loan notes. Fair Civil Justice responded by saying that the litigation funding market ...

Regulating the Firm, Not the Funder

Long Read / August 13, 2026

The SRA’s consumer-claims consultation and the limits of conduct regulation By Nick Rowles-Davies On 9 July 2026 the Solicitors Regulation Authority opened a consultation that would, for the first time, write third-party litigation funding into the conduct rules that bind every solicitor in England and Wales.[1] The proposals are careful and proportionate on their own terms. They are also a study in the limits of what a conduct regulator ...

The ILR’s Two-Front Campaign Against Litigation Funding

Long Read / June 4, 2026

Reading Lifting the Shadows (October 2025) and Justice for Growth (September 2025) By Nick Rowles-Davies Between 29 September and 14 October 2025, the US Chamber of Commerce's Institute for Legal Reform (ILR) published two pieces aimed at the same target on different continents. Justice for Growth urged the European Commission to use its competitiveness reform package as the vehicle for EU-wide regulation of third-party funding. Lifting the Shadows restated the ...

The South American Legal Finance Market: A Conversation with Marina Gouveia & Federico Muradas

June 3, 2026

Editor Nick Rowles-Davies sat down with regional litigation funding experts Marina Gouveia and Federico Muradass of Loopa to talk the exciting evolution of South America's legal finance market. Gouveia and Muradas discusses how litigation funders are assessing opportunities across key jurisdictions including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru. They explores the distinction between traditional litigation funding and Brazil's large precatórios market, while highlighting the increasing importance of arbitration across the ...

The Return of Appellate Monetisation

Long Read / May 26, 2026

What the Repricing of Judgment Preservation Insurance Means for Post-Trial Risk By Nick Rowles-Davies Appellate monetisation was a familiar feature of the litigation finance market in the late 2010s. A claimant won at trial, the defendant appealed and a funder advanced capital against the judgment in exchange for a share of the eventual recovery. The claimant obtained liquidity. The funder took the appellate risk. In the early 2020s, judgment preservation ...

The Big Interview: Joe Durkin of Burford Capital on the Business of Disputes & Litigation Funding in the GCC & India

May 19, 2026

By Nick Rowles-Davies Burford Capital, by nearly every metric, is the world’s largest litigation funder by a significant margin, specializing in legal finance, risk management, and complex legal disputes. When considering who to interview next for Legal Finance Expert (LFE), I picked up the phone and called my old friend, Joe Durkin. Joe Durkin is a Senior Vice President in Burford’s asset recovery business, responsible for legal finance investments across ...

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 ...