5 minutes with... Matthew Toma

1. You’ve written about how clients can manage and finance collection risk—but with only 2% of senior in-house lawyers reporting full recovery of judgments and awards over the past five years, a significant gap remains. What drives this shortfall, and how can claimants best position themselves to maximize recoveries?

Several structural dynamics contribute to this gap. First, selection bias: disputes that reach judgment are typically the most protracted and entrenched. By the time a decision is issued, parties—on both sides of the “v”—may no longer be guided solely by commercial considerations. Claimants may become fixated on recovering the full value of their claim, viewing any compromise as a concession. The result is often a judgment untethered from the reality of a respondent’s actual capacity to pay. Conversely, respondents may resist settlement not due to financial constraint, but to avoid setting a precedent or as a matter of principle. This zero-sum mindset—treating any payment as defeat, even after judgment—can drive respondents into a strategy of calculated non-compliance.

Second, enforcement remains an area of relative inexperience. Most companies are not serial litigants, and few have pursued the recovery of a large, contested award. There’s often an implicit assumption that success at trial leads directly to payment, something that is routinely disproven in practice. Maximizing recovery requires evaluating collection risk early—ideally before initiating proceedings—and developing a dispute strategy that integrates enforcement from the outset.

The reality is that claimants will almost always start at a disadvantage. The modern legal system presumes compliance with court orders, but when debtors choose not to pay or are otherwise willing to ignore the court, claimants need to respond quickly and decisively to secure their claims.

2.    Can you walk us through how Burford’s asset recovery team typically works alongside legal teams, and what benefits this brings to clients?

Our asset recovery practice is built to operate in close coordination with claimants’ legal teams. From the outset, every case we support is managed by a dedicated team of legal and investigative professionals who collaborate with counsel to identify recoverable assets, build evidence and design coordinated, multi-jurisdictional enforcement actions. Our in-house expertise and Burford’s balance sheet allow clients and counsel to pursue enforcement at scale and speed, ultimately delivering better recovery outcomes for everyone.

This integrated approach benefits clients in several ways:

• It allows for a coordinated enforcement strategy across jurisdictions and legal systems, avoiding fragmentation.
• It transfers the cost and risk of enforcement from the client to Burford, leaving clients to focus on their core business.
• It leverages our experience across a wide range of enforcement scenarios—from complex trust structures and veil-piercing litigation, to sovereign disputes and insolvency—to develop practical, cost-effective enforcement strategies.

3.    How is Burford leveraging technology and data analytics in its asset recovery practice?

We operate in an arena where the ability to locate, structure and analyze data at scale is essential to pursuing an effective enforcement strategy. While our team draws on a broad range of commercial data sources, Burford’s capital structure and our role in managing a large and diverse portfolio enables us to invest in proprietary datasets and technical infrastructure that are often beyond the reach of individual clients or third-party service providers.

For example, we have developed internal tools that aggregate and normalize fragmented registry data from multiple jurisdictions, offering unique visibility into asset ownership and movement. We routinely archive and apply custom code to merge and interrogate disparate datasets—ranging from historical versions of the Cayman Islands Aircraft Registry to cross-border investment records involving India—transforming raw data into functional, searchable intelligence. And while off-the-shelf document management systems offer basic search capabilities, we have found that building tailored indexing and retrieval tools is increasingly critical to ensuring efficient, targeted access to relevant information.

4.    Could you discuss a particularly complex case you've worked on, as well as the strategies employed to achieve a successful outcome?

A recent matter stands out as a textbook case of how our team’s legal and investigative capabilities work hand in hand to deliver results for our clients. It began with nothing more than a single image—an archived photo from a debtor’s social media account showing the back deck of a yacht. The only distinguishing feature was the railing—no name, no visible identifiers, just a snapshot.

Using social network graph analytics, we identified online images in which an individual was tagged aboard a vessel with a distinctive railing design matching our subject of interest. One of those images included a reference to a certain island and enough subtle geographic features (a fragment of mountainous coastline) to allow us to geolocate the yacht to a small harbor in the Mediterranean.

From there, we turned to historical AIS data to identify all private yachts that had visited the same harbor within a six-month window around the time the photos were posted. Working by process of elimination, we ultimately confirmed a match between the railing in the debtor’s photo and a yacht moored there during the relevant timeframe.

As expected, the yacht was owned through a layered offshore structure. Working closely with counsel, we supported the client in obtaining an ex parte disclosure order—filed under seal and with a gag provision—against the registered agent of the offshore holding company. Documents produced in response to the order revealed the debtor as the company’s beneficial owner.

By then, the yacht had been moved to a mooring near a small Caribbean island. Acting quickly and coordinating with local counsel in two jurisdictions—one common law, one civil code—we helped the client secure near-simultaneous freezing orders, one attaching the debtor’s shares in the holding company and the other restraining the yacht itself. 

5…tips for visiting Stockholm?

1. While there is something quite magical about the winter in Stockholm, unless you are a candle aficionado I would very much suggest visiting during the summer months!
2. Get out on the water. Stockholm is a city of islands and easy access to the archipelago means you’re never far from the water.
3. Decide whether you prefer kanelbullar (cinnamon buns) or kardemummabullar (cardamon buns) and be prepared to defend your decision.
4. Walk or cycle everywhere. Stockholm is eminently walkable and with great access to cycle infrastructure it’s a fantastic way to explore the city (unless you’re here in the winter, in which case refer back to #1)
5. You will never be far from coffee, but my favourite stops are Café Pascal off Odenplan and Drop Coffee on Sodermalm.