Litigation finance inched toward the mainstream in 2019, with both lawyers and corporate leaders expressing increasing openness towards taking outside capital to help pursue commercial claims. 

But it was an up-and-down year for some of the key players in the industry, which was estimated in November to have $9.5 billion in assets dedicated towards U.S. investments. One publicly traded giant, Burford Capital, saw its stock tumble after it was hammered by a short selling campaign. And a year after Vannin Capital announced that it was shelving its own IPO, the company was instead acquired by a SoftBank subsidiary which then purged its American operations.