Ashley Keller, '07: One of Crain's 40 Under 40

Ashley Keller and Adam Gerchen

37 and 35 | Managing director (Keller); CEO (Gerchen) | Gerchen Keller Capital

Adam Gerchen and Ashley Keller co-founded their litigation finance firm three years ago. Now it’s the largest in the industry, with $1.4 billion in assets under management. Gerchen Keller Capital invests in lawsuits, funding them in exchange for a cut of the eventual judgment or settlement, or, in some cases, lending money backed by an existing one. The field has ballooned in recent years as undercapitalized commercial plaintiffs try to match corporations’ legal firepower. The firm averaged a $10 million investment per case in 2015 and worked with clients of law firms like Kirkland & Ellis and Sidley Austin. It’s high-risk, high-reward: Returns can be an eye-popping 91 percent—or nothing.

For Keller, the work marries his interest in law and finance, creating opportunities to mull over sophisticated legal issues and connect them to questions of value. He would have wanted to do it as a kid if only he’d known the job existed: “Other people can be firefighters and astronauts; I want to be a litigation financier.”

Though both graduated from elite law schools, the running joke at the 20-full-timer River North firm is that Gerchen has never even taken the bar. He’s a numbers guy who describes himself as “passionate about risk arbitrage, which is an incredibly dorky thing to be passionate about,” who only got the JD to gain an edge in finance. His resume includes a stint at Goldman Sachs; Keller is a former partner at Chicago litigation boutique Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott. They met while working at hedge fund Alyeska Investment Group. Gerchen quit first to start the new firm and braved a couple of nerve-wracking months “getting on a train every day going to an office where I had nothing to do.”

Outside of work, Gerchen, a father of two, plays squash and guitar. Keller, who has three children, squeezes in swimming and violin, although “if you ask my wife, I don’t do anything else, because even when I’m with my family, my phone is not too far away.”