TRGP Capital is Spotlighting Industry Expertise and Social Good in Litigation Funding

L to R: Matthew Tarantino, Hassan Murphy, Shareef Ibraheem, Neeraj Borle, Reed Berry, Michael Rozen, Krishna Gambhir and Tom Stamatelos of TRGP Capital.

From the late ‘90s to the mid 2010s, two enterprising lawyers were taking on generation-defining cases. Noted dispute resolution expert Michael Rozen was tapped to negotiate settlement funds resulting from tragedies including 9/11 and the BP oil spill. Litigator Hassan Murphy, in addition to a bustling commercial practice, was championing underserved communities in crises including horrific housing conditions at “Murder Mall” in Baltimore and contaminated water in a multigenerational Black community.

Over time, Rozen began to reimagine how his expertise could affect change on a broader scale. His answer: fusing that knowledge with capital. In 2015, he founded litigation finance firm TRGP Capital, with the core mission to create a funding firm that was the “ultimate ally” in funding, developing legal strategy and achieving results. With world-class lawyers and financial advisors at the helm, Rozen realized that he could provide an unparalleled service – one that dovetails specific and in-depth legal expertise with substantial financial resources and strategy. He could see more cases through than he ever could as a practicing lawyer – and the challenge would be a thrill.

All he needed was a team. His natural next step was to ask Murphy – a fellow self-described “challenge junkie” – to come on board. “The challenge was enticing – how we would both bring to bear our skill sets in a way that no one else in the industry really had,” says Murphy.

Together with their team of fellow celebrated lawyers and leading financial professionals, Rozen and Murphy have built one of the nation’s foremost funding providers, with a diverse portfolio including commercial disputes, intellectual property cases, environmental claims, law firm financing and more. Now, they’re expanding their gaze to provide relief to at-risk groups through social impact litigation – changing the landscape for litigants from entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley to multigenerational, underserved communities.

FROM LAWYERS…

Before entering the funding world, Rozen was renowned for resolving defense-side complex mass tort and mass disaster litigation, spending more than 20 years as a partner at prominent complex dispute resolution boutique Feinberg Rozen.

The day after Thanksgiving, 2001, he was appointed by then-President Bush as Deputy Special Master of the U.S. government’s 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund. Rozen was responsible for allocating $7B to families of victims – a greater figure than Congress had initially proposed, and one that he and his team pushed to raise. They set up intake centers; Rozen ran the center near the site of the World Trade Center, personally meeting with nearly all of the 3,000 claimants as well as first responders and others affected by the tragedy. “We were helping solve problems; helping victims and their families,” Rozen says, adding that even in his private work, “though I was representing corporations who were alleged to have done wrong, the ultimate goal was to help the corporation survive while compensating victims fairly and timely.”

Rozen was a key party in other widely publicized disputes, as well. He was appointed by President Obama as Deputy Administrator of BP’s Gulf Coast Compensation Fund to resolve claims arising from the company’s infamous 2010 oil spill. He was outside resolution counsel for Penn State University during the fallout of the Jerry Sandusky sexual assault scandal. He mediated settlements following the tragic West Virginia Upper Big Branch coal mine disaster in 2010, in which 38 miners were killed.

Murphy, meanwhile, started out in corporate law before joining his father, legendary litigator and judge Billy Murphy, to start their own practice. Murphy is a third-generation African American lawyer from Baltimore. His grandfather, William H. Murphy Sr., grew up on the same street as Thurgood Marshall, and would become one of the first African American judges to preside in the state of Maryland. “It was in his blood to clap back at unfairness,” Murphy says.

Murphy decided to carve a slightly new path for himself, going into transactional law at a major New York firm. Until, one day, his father called with a major opportunity: He’d been hired by famed boxing promoter Don King to represent him in a federal criminal trial and wanted Murphy to join him. Initially hesitant, Murphy finally took a leave from his firm to work on the trial. He was instantly hooked. When it was time to return to his firm, Murphy remembers, “’I said to him, ‘I won’t go back if you commit to building a first-class plaintiffs’ firm with me.’ And he was as eager and excited about it as I was.”

They worked to be 'on the side of the angels,' Murphy says.

Within a year, they had a firm – Murphy, Falcon & Murphy. They took on major clients on both sides of the docket, including household names like Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft and H&R Block. His firm also achieved major victories for families of victims of police brutality, including obtaining a $6.4M settlement for the family of Freddie Gray, who was killed by Baltimore police in 2015. And, during all those matters, he was keeping an eye out for pro bono matters that would affect underserved communities, including representing African American victims of predatory lending, environmental justice matters and spearheading cases on behalf of those suffering from shocking housing conditions. They worked to be “on the side of the angels,” Murphy says.

…TO FUNDERS

The thought process behind TRGP, Rozen says, began when he was young, sitting in corporate board rooms. “I realized that there was a big gap between the most opportune outcome and the actual result” in most cases, he says. “So, the ideal versus the reality always left a big delta. And that delta was a lot of wasted money. I thought if money was going to be wasted, there had to be a way to invest in that. And that was the derivation of TRGP.”

Though Rozen and Murphy first met working on opposite sides of a case, they quickly built a mutual respect and friendship. One day Rozen called Murphy to say he was leaving his firm to go into the litigation finance business, adding, “I think it is a real opportunity to jump to the next level.”

"He was the only person to whom I would have been receptive to such a cockamamie idea – to the notion that I would change my entire life and give up an enormously successful practice to venture into something nascent and untested,” Murphy says. But, intrigued by the challenge, he agreed.

One of the reasons they were so successful at the outset, the pair explain, is that they already had experience investing capital in litigation within their own firms. As Murphy was growing his firm, he says, it became just as much about managing finances, risk and case selection as it was about litigating cases, as they operated on a largely contingent fee basis and invested tens of millions of dollars of their own capital. “It was what I was gravitating toward in my practice; less and less wanting to try cases, more and more wanting to figure out the most interesting, efficient and strategic path to doing things at a high level, maximizing resources,” he says.

 As a result, in 2017, TRGP raised its first pool of discretionary capital – $300M – quickly. “We had already done the thing we were now seeking to do. Working on risk throughout our careers, investing our own capital toward a result to a high degree of success. That is what we do now as litigation funders,” Murphy explains. “I think it was readily apparent to the institutional investors, who ultimately became our investors, just how ready for this role as asset managers we were.”

DILIGENCE, EXPERTISE AND TRUST

As the firm’s capital grew, so did its powerhouse team. Before Murphy even fully transitioned from his law firm to TRGP they brought on managing director David Killalea, a complex litigation attorney with 25 years’ experience representing corporate clients with a specialty in insurance coverage.

Then, they added managing director Will Zerhouni, a former Florida Assistant U.S. Attorney and a patent litigator for Covington & Burling specializing in life sciences and technology companies. That tech knowledge extended past the law; he also spent years running tech companies and startups before joining the team at Murphy, Falcon & Murphy and then making the move to TRGP. 

Ben Preziosi, another member of the team, spent 38 years as a practicing lawyer focusing on white-collar criminal cases and SEC investigations, as well as developing a world-class international arbitration practice.

Other managing partners include investment banker Charline Plessis, mass tort litigator Jeff Healy and appellate litigator Eric Citron. The firm also boasts four investment associates with backgrounds in investing, private equity, consulting and more. In all, they have 16 professionals, each of whom “is a star in the area they were in prior to coming to TRGP,” Rozen says.

The priority was building a team with diverse and deep sets of expertise. Rozen and Murphy were both litigators, but one more defense-oriented and the other more plaintiffs’-focused – which balanced themselves out to start. They multiplied that diverse perspective by hiring a team with deep and varied facets of institutional knowledge – and, always, people whose judgement they trusted. “Ultimately, this is all about judgement, right?” Murphy explains. “Because there are no hard and fast rules, and it is about how your experience informs your decision making. That is all judgement. That is the thing, I think, that differentiates us by orders of magnitude.”

That broad knowledge base also makes TRGP efficient: Rozen points out that while other litigation finance firms may bring on outside white-shoe firms to advise on a case, all of that knowledge comes in-house with the capital at TRGP, providing expert litigation insight and funding in one fell swoop. “I think the reputation we’ve gathered in the industry for being the most thorough with our diligence, the most thoughtful, the most insightful strategically means that we’re about a lot more than money. And it’s why parties seek us out,” says Rozen. The team also brings relationships they’ve built litigating cases over decades apiece across the country, combining knowledge with connections.

INVESTING IN FUTURE GENERATIONS

TRGP’s investments have supported entrepreneurs, major companies, whistleblowers, IP holders, law firms and more – but since the firm’s inception, Rozen and Murphy have always wanted to return to their roots by aiding underserved communities who need help most.

Last year, the firm founded Flashlight Capital – a dedicated change-making litigation fund with “the idea of being able to track positive social impact over time while also producing commercial returns for investors,” says Rozen.

The reputation we’ve gathered in the industry for being the most thorough with our diligence, the most thoughtful, the most insightful strategically means that we’re about a lot more than money. And it’s why parties seek us out,' says Rozen.

“One of the things we both learned throughout our careers is that there are plenty of problems begging for a solution, and the courts often can be the only avenue to force change and award damages,” Murphy says. But risk-averse lawyers aren’t always in a position to tackle those problems. “We have seen all manner of instances where problems that could be solved – but for resources and imagination – go unsolved and become systemic blights with multigenerational impacts,” he explains.

A program like Flashlight had always been a foundational part of the firm plan. While the pandemic delayed the project, it remained a priority. With the world back on its feet, they are now in the final stages of their $250M raise for the fund.

The team selects Flashlight cases based on a rubric of demonstrable impact, measured by severity of the problem, number of people affected, the difficulty of the case and how lasting the impact might be – prioritizing community-based, multigenerational impact. Currently, they are involved in cases concerning human trafficking, sexual abuse and environmental justice.

One notable matter they’re backing concerns the community along the UK’s River Wye, which has faced high levels of phosphorus pollution resulting from runoff of chicken excrement from a major multinational corporation’s nearby poultry farms. Murphy explains that the pollution has killed the river in multiple spots, diminishing the value of property along the river, depriving residents of leisurely use of the river, as well as killing businesses that once thrived along the river including fishermen and recreational providers like boat and kayak rentals. “That has a cascading effect throughout the community that surrounds the river to the tune of multiple hundreds of millions of dollars of impact,” he says.

“We have seen all manner of instances where problems that could be solved – but for resources and imagination – go unsolved and become systemic blights with multigenerational impacts,” Murphy explains.

Murphy looks back on his legal career for reference in thinking about Flashlight’s impact. Running his firm, he was able to pour millions of dollars behind cases that affected positive social change. One day, for example, he was reading the paper when he saw a story about a Black community in Anne Arundel County, Md., whose water wells had become contaminated by coal byproduct. He was left with the question, “And? What is happening for these people?” The answer, he learned, was nothing. He’d never worked on an environmental case, but he reached out to a community organizer friend and prepared a multi-hundred-million-dollar action on behalf of the community. The case settled, and the residents received compensation, connection to public water and a new community center – all of which will aid them, their children and grandchildren.

While Murphy was able to take that risk, he recognizes that is not the usual course of action. “If you think about how the world thinks about remedies for poor folks, to change that paradigm and risk your own time and energy and money, most firms won’t do that – which is why I think Flashlight has such a vital role in providing support in instances like this,” Murphy says.

CHALLENGE: FULFILLED

Now nearly 10 years into TRGP’s founding, Rozen and Murphy find that their current work is the logical extension of their former practices. “I got to take all that I have learned and experienced and bring it to bear each and every day in making decisions about which cases, lawyers and litigants to support,” says Murphy. He adds that a broad part of the appeal for him is that they now get to impact more cases than they ever could as lawyers. “We are able to positively impact litigations across a multitude of case types and countries and legal systems. And that’s exciting to me in a way that outpaces the practice,” he says.

Rozen agrees. While a major litigation is something a practicing lawyer can focus on a couple of times a year, he says, “at TRGP we focus on it a couple of times a day and a couple of dozen times a week. And maybe 100 or more times a month.”

Rozen’s passion for taking on challenges has paid off. In making the bold decision to change his career path, he and the team he’s built have positively impacted the lives of untold numbers of claimants, from innovative entrepreneurs to victims of crimes and negligence.

And then there’s the positive impact on his own life. “The challenge is exciting, growing a business is exciting and working with really, really talented people – both within and outside of TRGP – is exciting and fun,” Rozen says. “Who wouldn’t want to do that?”