Michael Leavitt
Chief Operating Officer
Phone: +1-212-624-1888
Email: mike@benchwalk.com
LinkedIn: Connect with Us
Acquisition International (AI)
Global Excellence Award 2021
Most Innovative Legal Capital Solutions Provider - UK
Mr. Leavitt is Chief Operating Officer of Bench Walk Advisors. He has 30+ years’ hands‐on experience that includes managing law firms and family office business operations, as well as starting new companies, launching products and services, managing consulting and service organizations, advising entrepreneurs and corporate executives, and marketing premium services to commercial, institutional, HNW and government clients. He has worked with founders and senior management to create and document plans and forecasts used for raising capital, launching products and services, recruiting key personnel, selecting distribution channels, expanding markets, evaluating strategic alliances, and corporate sales and acquisitions.
Most recently he served as President of Windlass LLC, a consulting firm specializing in developing and executing business, strategic, marketing and financial plans for entrepreneurial service companies. His notable assignments included serving as interim COO/CFO for Grant & Eisenhofer, where he launched national and international business development plans and recruited a permanent COO. For a multi‐family office, he developed business and start‐up operations plans, provided ongoing strategic advice and CFO services, and later negotiated the sale of the firm to a strategic buyer.
Mr. Leavitt has served on the Board of the Institutional Investors Educational Foundation (IIEF), a not‐for‐profit organization with a mission to enhance shareholder rights, improve corporate governance and promote ethical corporate behavior through education and dialogue at conferences and roundtable discussions in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia.
He was a co‐founder of Windlass Air LLC, a firm that provides strategic advice and aircraft charter brokerage to entrepreneurs, HNW individuals, and family offices. Prior to forming Windlass, Mr. Leavitt was the Vice President of Execaire, a Canadian‐based aircraft management firm. He had full oversight of their U.S. office, including staffing and preparing business and marketing plans, budgets, proposals, market research, and competitive analyses. He identified and evaluated new business and prospective acquisition targets; managed outside consultants, lawyers, accountants, and investment advisors; and conducted financial and market analyses on behalf of the Canadian parent company.
Mr. Leavitt was previously the President and COO of Weather Services Corporation, which provided customized meteorological information and consulting services to commodity traders, agribusiness, financial services, financial information providers, utilities, interactive services, newswires, newspapers, radio, aviation, marine and government. He reported to the Board of Directors with full P&L and operational responsibility for 130 employees, a 24‐hour operations center, IT development, marketing, finance, product management and development, direct negotiations with major accounts, contract pricing and proposal preparation.
Prior to joining WSC, Mr. Leavitt co‐founded WSI Corporation, one of the first weather information providers to the burgeoning interactive industry. He partnered with information providers including Bloomberg, Reuters, Dow Jones, AOL and USA Today to provide digital weather information and satellite imagery for a variety of industries. He wrote and executed the initial business plan and later successfully negotiated the sale of the corporation. Currently, the firm is owned by IBM.
MARKET INDUSTRY UPDATES + ARTICLES
We’re delighted to announce that we are sponsoring the much-anticipated LF Dealmakers, European Edition.
Next month, Istanbul Arbitration Week will kick off its second year. Lawdragon chatted with one of the main organizers of the conference, Ayse Yazir, about the topics, panelists and special events taking place at ISTAW this year.
Ayse Yazir’s early career in insurance taught her how to spot a good investment. Now, as a litigation funder, she sorts through securities cases, class actions and more that come to her from across the globe, searching for the cases her firm’s funding can make into headline successes.
Adrian Chopin chosen at ‘Litigation Funding Adviser of the year’ 2022, by Lawyer Monthly
Istanbul Arbitration Week kicks off next week, running October 10 to 14. This is the second year for the event, hosted by the Energy Disputes Arbitration Center, or EDAC. Topics include collecting on claims, ADR mechanisms, the Energy Charter Treaty, litigation funding and other subjects pertinent to arbitration.
You were awarded the Turkish National State Scholarship to study Turkish Law at Başkent University and studied English Law at Nottingham Law School, England. Tell us about your experiences studying in two separate countries and what made you decide to become a lawyer…..
Stuart Grant, known internationally for his plaintiff advocacy work on behalf of stockholders, co-founded Bench Walk Advisors in 2017. The company has since invested nearly half a billion dollars into over 150 commercial cases and portfolios. They have offices in New York, Delaware and London.
Bench Walk are proud to announce that four of our team members have been named as industry leaders in the 2022 Lawdragon Global Litigation Finance Guide.
We are proud to introduce the 2022 class of the Lawdragon Hall of Fame. Among them are the nation’s greatest corporate litigators, plaintiff powerhouses, innovators who established new areas of law practice and individuals whose dedication to a sometimes precarious legal system are unsurpassed.
Kosovo has made significant efforts toward building a successful legal framework for protecting foreign
investments. Kosovo became a party to the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes
(“ICSID”) convention in 2009; has passed a number of domestic laws and regulations promoting foreign
investments; has signed and ratified various bilateral investment treaties (“BIT”); and has passed a
domestic arbitration law that is largely based on the UNCITRAL Model Law. In little more than a decade
of state-building, Kosovo has clearly recognized the importance of foreign direct investments for
developing its emerging economy.
What does the future hold for investment protection in Europe? A colossal question that resonates across board rooms and government halls on both sides of the Channel. With a consortium of investment law experts including Nikos Lavranos (NL Investment Consulting), Ayse Lowe (Bench Walk), Gordon Nardell QC (Twenty Essex), and Laura Rees-Evans (Fietta LLP) joining together, the webinar held on 30 June 2021 provided multi-disciplinary viewpoints that will be of interest to both investors and States alike.
Massive congratulations to our UK Team for winning Acquisition International Magazine's ‘Most Innovative Legal Capital Solutions Provider’ award.
In my prior blogs I examined “implied probability of loss” as a way of analysing the risk and price of transactions in the litigation funding market.
Let’s take for example (and with all the usual caveats about being reductive) a funder that determines that a case has, say, a 2/3 chance of winning and generating for both the claimant and the funder lots of money, and a 1/3 chance of losing with an attendant destruction of the funder’s entire investment. When pricing this case that funder must charge, on a win, $1.5 for every $1 invested just to break even. This is because the funder has a 1 in 3 chance of losing 100% and a 2/3 chance of winning 150%, which yields, on average, 100% (that is, a mere return of the funder’s investment).
Considering the importance of English Courts in international commercial litigations and arbitrations, there are significant develop- ments each year. While some of these decisions are welcomed among scholars and practitioners, some of them are highly criticised. This paper reviews some of the most critical arbitration-related decisions from the English Courts in 2019. These cases illustrate the pragmatic nature and pro-arbitration stance of the English Courts.
Congratulations to Co-founder and Managing Director, Stuart Grant, on being recognised in Lawdragon's inaugural guide dedicated to the role of legal finance in law firms worldwide, which brings together pioneers of litigation finance, who’ve helped build this field for decades alongside young stars bringing technological tools to better funding assessment and results.
Dispute Resolution analysis: Ayse Lowe, director at Bench Walk Advisors, details the benefits of litigation funding to in-house counsel and advises on funding portfolios. Interviewed for Lexis Nexis by Halima Dikko.
Litigation funding has typically focused on claimant side investment. Defence funding feels less valuable because it does not so obviously unlock an asset. In addition, the cash benefit of having a funder pay defence legal costs will often be dwarfed by the potential cash payout by the defendant on a loss. And finally, a defendant worth suing is usually not cash constrained in the same way as many claimants who seek funding. But as the funding market has matured, some funders, defence lawyers and their clients have begun to express interest in defence funding.
Litigation funding has typically focused on claimant side investment. Defence funding feels less valuable because it does not so obviously unlock an asset. In addition, the cash benefit of having a funder pay defence legal costs will often be dwarfed by the potential cash payout by the defendant on a loss. And finally, a defendant worth suing is usually not cash constrained in the same way as many claimants who seek funding. But as the funding market has matured, some funders, defence lawyers and their clients have begun to express interest in defence funding.
Bench Walk Advisors is proud to have financed this claim and to have helped facilitate a great outcome for the plaintiffs. On behalf of everyone at Bench Walk, our warmest congratulations to all involved.