Ep 138: Akiva Katz - What's the damage?

In this episode, David is joined again by Akiva Katz, one of the founders of Bow Street LLC, an event-driven hedge fund manager, to discuss their litigation financing strategy. Aiming to produce IRRs in excess of 15 to 20% p.a. from litigation financing, Bow Street finds and purchases litigation assets in which guilt has already been established and the outcome is no longer binary. In these cases the question changes from will there be to damages, to "How much are the damages?". Akiva Katz, and his business partner, Howard Shainker, became friends in 2004 at Harvard Business School. There they came up with the idea for Bow Street, named after a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near the restaurant where they would meet to talk about their plan. Believing that economic conditions would be setting up for a momentous event-driven climate over the next several years, they wanted to create a hedge fund that would combine research-intensive approach with an event-driven mentality.