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Eva Shang

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Eva Shang dropped out of Harvard at 20 to start a company that bets on lawsuits. Six years later, she'd built that company into a $1.6 billion alternative asset manager. It's the kind of trajectory that sounds like Silicon Valley mythology — except every number is real, the returns are uncorrelated to markets, and the founder had to build an entirely new category of institutional investing from scratch. Legalist, co-founded with Harvard classmate Christian Haigh in 2016, uses proprietary technology and AI to scrape court dockets and identify litigation investments — primarily small and mid-market cases under $1 million — where the risk-return profile favors the plaintiff. Think of it as data-driven venture capital for the legal system: fund promising cases, take a share of the settlement, and build a portfolio with an 80% success rate across 500+ investments. The early days were as difficult as you'd expect for two 20-year-olds trying to raise capital for litigation finance. Their first fund took a full year to reach $10 million in 2017. Y Combinator (which owns 7%) and Peter Thiel's fellowship provided early credibility, but the real selling point was performance: consistent returns in the 20-25% net IRR range, uncorrelated to public markets, across a portfolio of cases spanning commercial disputes, bankruptcy DIP lending, and government receivables. Shang also became a licensed attorney through an apprenticeship pathway — without attending law school — adding legal expertise to her analytical toolkit. She leads Legalist's 35-person team of engineers, attorneys, and analysts, sits on the firm's valuation and investment committees, and recently closed Fund IV at $400 million. What's extraordinary about Legalist isn't just the scale — it's the innovation. Before Shang, litigation finance was an opaque, relationship-driven industry dominated by large players making eight- and nine-figure bets. Legalist democratized the approach by using technology to source, underwrite, and manage hundreds of smaller cases simultaneously. It's genuinely new infrastructure for an asset class that barely existed a decade ago. With 6,400 LinkedIn followers, a modest personal Substack on non-finance topics, and Forbes 30 Under 30 recognition from 2018, Shang occupies an interesting middle ground: known in alt-investment circles but far from household name status. The gap between what she's built and how few people could name her is substantial.

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