The Spreadsheet Status Quo in Litigation Finance

It’s 2025, and litigation funding has evolved into a multi-billion-pound global market attracting pension funds, insurers, and other institutional investors, with some forecasts suggesting a market size of over $50bn by 2035¹. Yet behind the scenes, most litigation finance firms still manage their portfolios and investor relations with nothing more sophisticated than Excel spreadsheets and long email threads. This reliance on manual tools remains the norm across much of the industry, even as fund sizes grow and deals span multiple jurisdictions. The result is an operational status quo that is familiar but fraught with risk.

Inefficiency, Errors, and Bottlenecks

Running a litigation finance fund through spreadsheets and emails introduces significant inefficiencies and the potential for costly mistakes. Teams often spend countless hours on data entry and updating records, since every change to a case’s status means reworking multiple documents. This manual workload isn’t just slow – it’s error-prone. Frequent manual changes or updates often cause delays and can increase the likelihood of human error. In our conversations with Funders, we have heard the same story many times over – changes that should be simple often require multiple days of operational effort, and it isn’t uncommon to have to reissue critical reports as errors are found after publishing. Important information gets siloed in disparate files or inboxes, making it difficult to get a real-time view of the portfolio’s status. 

Such fragmented workflows also slow down the velocity of capital. Time-sensitive disbursements – for example, drawing down on funds when a case hits a new milestone – can be delayed by bottlenecks in manual processes. In litigation funding, where claimants and law firms may urgently need cash, these delays can be critical. In short, sticking with spreadsheets introduces operational drag: tasks take longer, oversight gaps widen, and the risk of an input error or missed update grows with each additional case or investor.

Growing Risks with Scale and Institutional Capital

These risks only compound as a fund scales up. A small fund might track a handful of cases in a spreadsheet without disaster, but a large portfolio with diverse cases and complex financial structures pushes manual tools beyond their limits. Human error and lack of transparency become unacceptable when managing hundreds of millions in deployments and returns. Moreover, today’s litigation financiers are increasingly courting institutional investors who demand institutional-grade processes and standardisation. As large asset managers and pension funds consider investing capital into litigation finance, they bring with them expectations for robust data reporting, transparency, and timelines. Fund managers who rely on email and Excel will struggle to meet these performance expectations.

There’s also a governance aspect: regulators and limited partners (LPs) increasingly expect strong internal controls and auditability in this maturing asset class. Manually maintained spreadsheets make it harder to implement clear audit trails or provide up-to-date reporting. Without the right infrastructure, even experienced funders may find it difficult to scale their operations. In fact, many fund managers lack the tools to onboard a diverse set of outside investors, allocate capital across cases and complex SPV ownership structures, or provide transparent performance dashboards, limiting their ability to grow with external capital. Simply put, you can’t take a boutique operation and turn it into a world-class fund on spreadsheets alone.

Unique Complexities Demand Specialised Tools

Why haven’t generic private capital platforms solved this? The truth is that litigation funding is uniquely operationally complex, and generalist software often falls short. Litigation finance deals are not like standard loans or equity investments. They are typically milestone-driven and contingent – capital is drawn down in tranches only as needed to cover legal fees and expenses, rather than in a predictable schedule. Pay-outs to investors often depend on case outcomes that may take years to materialise, with no interim cash flows. The very “assets” being managed are non-standard: they might be an interest in a legal claim, a bundle of court judgments, or even attorneys’ receivables, with the expected lawsuit proceeds serving as collateral². This means fund managers must track a constantly moving web of case updates, legal milestones, and conditional payouts that traditional fund administration software isn’t built to handle.

General private equity or loan management systems assume relatively straightforward cash flows and uniform deal structures, but litigation funding involves contingency-linked structures and bespoke terms for each deal. As a result, the funders we spoke to who had tried off-the-shelf solutions ended up resorting to manual workarounds. When the tools don’t fit the asset, people revert to spreadsheets. Ironically, the very complexities that make litigation finance unique also make it more urgent to automate. Tracking complex drawdowns and legal developments by hand is a recipe for mistakes; automation can ensure nothing falls through the cracks as cases progress.

Purpose-Built Infrastructure for Litigation Funders

The good news is that the status quo is finally starting to change. Fenaro is a next-generation technology platform built to replace spreadsheets with systems and processes tailored specifically to the end-to-end needs of litigation funders. It combines portfolio management, case tracking, borrower management, and investor reporting in a single integrated solution. 

Modern fund administration platforms like Fenaro deliver real-time drill-down data visualisations of portfolio performance (e.g. total portfolio value over time), replacing the static, manual tracking of Excel spreadsheets.

Crucially, these platforms are built around litigation finance workflows. Fenaro, for instance, supports drawdown-based disbursements triggered by case milestones, reflecting how legal funding deals actually operate. It is designed to natively handle complex fund structures (such as multiple SPVs or syndicated co-investments) and automatically reconcile capital flows as money moves from investors to cases and back. On the investor side, funders can give their LPs a secure portal with customisable dashboards and instant access to reports, so investors see up-to-date metrics like NAV, IRR, exposures, and expected pay-out timelines. Waterfall models for distributions are built in, eliminating the spreadsheet gymnastics that many finance teams have had to perform each time a case resolves. In short, a purpose-built platform like this delivers the operational control and transparency that litigation funders have long lacked.

Equally important, adopting specialised infrastructure helps minimise risk and streamline compliance. This embedded governance means fund managers can demonstrate strong controls to regulators and institutional partners – a key advantage when seeking to scale or attract new capital. It also frees up the team’s time: instead of wrestling with version 28 of a massive spreadsheet and spending all their time wrangling data issues, they can focus on high value analysis that supports the sourcing of quality cases and world-class client servicing.

Time to Modernise

The systems a funder uses will ultimately shape their ability to scale, govern, and deliver returns. Litigation finance may be a niche alternative asset class, but its back-office needs are mission-critical. If a funder is serious about growth and performance, they need to invest in the right tools, not just in the right cases. In practical terms, that means ditching the spreadsheets and upgrading to purpose-built software that can handle the complexity and volume the industry is reaching.

The litigation funding sector is poised for further expansion, and those who modernise their infrastructure now will be positioned to move faster, with greater confidence and transparency. The era of managing multi-million-pound legal investment funds via Excel and Outlook is drawing to a close. A new era of bespoke, intelligent fund administration is on the rise – and with it, litigation financiers can finally leave their spreadsheet baggage behind and focus on what really matters: deploying capital to meritorious cases, and delivering outstanding results for investors and claimants alike.

About Fenaro

Fenaro is the platform for managing operationally complex assets - built from the ground-up to meet the complex needs of litigation funders. Find out more at Fenaro.com.

Fenaro is onboarding now, book a demo today and see how we can help your fund move beyond spreadsheets.

1.  Litigation Funding Market Outlook. Research Nester.
   https://www.researchnester.com/reports/litigation-funding-investment-market/2800

2.  What a fund manager should know about entering the litigation finance industry. SRZ.
   https://www.srz.com/a/web/164027/What-a-Fund-Manager-Should-Know.pdf