The trio who formed Gerchen Keller Capital (GKC) are moving on to a new venture just over a year after the $160 million sale of their litigation finance firm to Burford Capital Ltd.

Adam Gerchen, Ashley Keller and Travis Lenkner have quietly launched Keller Lenkner, a plaintiff-side litigation firm in Chicago that works exclusively under alternative fee agreements. The trio gained notoriety by growing their litigation finance firm GKC to $1.3 billion in assets under management before selling it to publicly traded Burford in December 2016.

The trio will remain as “senior advisors” to Burford.

The Keller Lenkner firm has a bare-bones website and Class A office space in a new tower in Chicago's West Loop. It also has clients but none that have yet to appear on public dockets, Lenkner said in an interview. The firm will focus on multidistrict litigation, mass tort actions and class action litigation.

While the types of cases the group intends to handle may be well-suited for litigation funding in some instances, Lenkner said his new firm will have no special ties to litigation finance.

“We think we're well-situated not only to add a lot of value for clients, but also to bring a new perspective to the plaintiff's bar and to continue to work based on our combination of experiences in law and finance,” Lenkner said. “In particular, our experience evaluating litigation risk. The difference is it's now risk we're taking ourselves instead of evaluating risk that other people are taking.”

News of the law firm launch comes about two months after Burford said that Lenkner, Keller and Gerchen would be stepping back from day-to-day business roles at the world's largest litigation funder to serve as “senior advisors.” Gerchen had previously been Burford's president, while Keller and Lenkner served as managing directors.

Transitioning out of those roles was not planned as part of the GKC sale, Lenkner said. But the speed and success of his firm's integration with Burford “outpaced” their expectations. Burford announced in early January that it had committed $1.3 billion in capital toward new investments last year, more than triple the amount from 2016.

The release announcing their new senior adviser roles, which also lauded the speed and success of GKC's integration with Burford, raised some eyebrows in the tight-knit litigation finance world because of its reference to a noncompete agreement that Gerchen, Keller and Lenkner would be subject to until December 2020.

The release also noted that the trio, who will remain senior advisers to Burford while working at Keller Lenkner, have a lockup on their Burford stock until December 2019. Lenkner downplayed the significance of the noncompete agreement.

“If we wanted to be at a litigation finance firm, we'd be at Burford,” he said. “Everyone [at Burford] is great.”

Christopher Bogart, co-founder and CEO of Burford Capital, said in a statement that the company has “been delighted” by the integration of GKC into Burford.

“Adam, Ashley and Travis' transition to senior advisors is the natural outcome of our success with a game-changing acquisition for Burford and the legal finance industry,” Bogart said. “We expect 2018 and beyond will bring more great achievements both for Burford and also for Adam, Ashley and Travis. We are looking forward to continuing our collaborative relationship with them.”

The GKC founders are now looking to recruit litigators and trial lawyers to build out their firm's roster. They will be aided in that task by the experience they gained recruiting a long list of Big Law partners and other talented lawyers at GKC and Burford.

Lenkner said many of the skills his team looked for while recruiting at litigation funding companies would carry over to building their law firm.

“We need to be able to analyze the merits of cases, anticipate the odds of success and think with very clear eyes about whether those cases present compelling opportunities where we're willing to put firm resources at risk in order to be involved,” Lenkner said.

For Lenkner and Keller, the move represents a return to private practice.

Keller was previously a partner at litigation boutique Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. Lenkner was an associate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher before working in-house as a senior counsel at The Boeing Co. Gerchen's background is in the financial industry, having worked at The Goldman Sachs Group and at the Alyeska Investment Group in Chicago. He also holds a law degree from Harvard Law School.

Lenkner said the new firm will look to recruit a wide swathe of lawyers, from trial partners to first-year associates.

“As the firm grows and develops, if we're aware of what we believe are our strengths, we're also aware of the areas where we would want to begin building out the team,” Lenkner said. “And we're already speaking with people about both partner and associate level opportunities.”