Burford Capital's New York offices in Manhattan.

Litigation funding giant Burford Capital is kicking off the new year by announcing new management changes, teasing a potential New York listing and celebrating the end of a securities class action lawsuit linked to the company's relatively rocky 2019.

Senior managing director Aviva Will and managing director David Perla have been promoted to co-chief operating officers in New York, where they will oversee Burford's global marketing, origination and underwriting teams, the company said Tuesday. Mark Klein, Burford's general counsel, is also now the firm's chief administrative officer. Craig Arnott, the firm's London managing director, was promoted to deputy chief investment officer.

Perla said the promotions were part of an effort by Buford to "fully coordinate our business on a global basis," integrate its origination and underwriting teams, and bolster its investment management capabilities.

"Put all of this together, the goal is to really continue to allow us to scale the business as we've been doing over the last couple of years," Perla said.

In its Tuesday press release, the litigation financier also said it "plans either to add a U.S. listing on the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ for trading in its ordinary shares or to migrate to the London Stock Exchange ('LSE') Main Market." The London AIM, where the company's stock currently trades, is a submarket of the LSE.

The moves come a little more than a week after a federal judge in Brooklyn dismissed a class action lawsuit that accused Burford and some of its leaders of "manipulating its metrics … to create a misleading picture of investment returns to investors."

A Burford spokeswoman emphasized that the changes in management and the dismissal of the lawsuit are "completely unrelated. They have nothing to do with one another."

Perla said Burford's business right now is "better than it's ever been," and he sees the promotions as a response to that. He said the company had moved on from a tumultuous August, when a report from short-selling investment research firm Muddy Waters caused Burford's shares on London's AIM to drop and spawned the New York investor litigation.

"We looked at August and said, OK, we have a job to do, we want to help clients, we have to put our investors' money to work, they trust us with that," Perla said. "I don't know that we view this as kind of a 'reset,' we did go about our business and we really just kept our heads down."

The Muddy Waters report called Burford "a poor business masquerading as a great one" and asserted that the company is "arguably already insolvent." Burford investor Stephen Merz sued the litigation financier in the Eastern District of New York soon afterward.

Four months later, however, Merz moved to voluntarily dismiss his own lawsuit Dec. 19, before Burford filed a response to his allegations. Gershon dismissed the lawsuit without prejudice Dec. 30.

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