Shaping the Future of Litigation Funding: A Conversation with Apex’s New Head of Legal

Gabriel Olearnik has joined Apex Litigation Finance as Head of Legal, Special Situations, marking the latest step in a career that has spanned both law and litigation investment. Before joining Apex, Olearnik held leadership roles at Delta Capital Partners, Asertis, and LitFin, and most recently founded Burgundy Capital Management, where he served as Chief Investment Officer. His appointment underscores Apex’s ambition to combine disciplined case assessment with agile deal-making as it targets growth in small and mid-size commercial disputes.

“I was drawn to Apex because it is at a moment of acceleration,” Olearnik said. “The business has already established credibility, but it is also ambitious in terms of the cases it is willing to pursue and the way it wants to structure transactions.”

For Olearnik, Apex’s attraction lies in its balance of stability and innovation. “At this stage in my career, I want to put my experience into an organisation that can benefit from both discipline and creativity, and Apex felt like the natural home for that,” he explained.

He also pointed to the strength of the leadership team. “Maurice Power brings gravitas and commercial insight, Tim Fallowfield is a financial expert with decades of experience, and I deal with the law,” he said. “That combination gives us a strong foundation, while our appetite to fund small and mid-size commercial disputes sets us apart in the market.”

A focus on clarity and responsiveness

Olearnik’s immediate priority as Head of Legal is simple but decisive: clarity. “Good funding requires a disciplined framework for decision-making, but also a willingness to be creative where the facts demand it,” he said. “My focus is on clarity around risk, clarity around process, and clarity around communication with counterparties.”

He sees the role as a strategic enabler that helps the investment team move faster while maintaining Apex’s identity as a nimble, high-performing funder. “We don’t need to be the biggest funder in the room, but we do need to be the most effective and responsive,” he said. “Thanks to the support of our institutional investor, we can make quick decisions and deploy capital immediately, which is exactly what clients and law firms value most.”

Where law and finance converge

With experience that straddles both the legal and financial sides of funding, Olearnik views litigation finance as a discipline that thrives on integration. “Litigation funding is really the meeting point of law and finance, and having lived on both sides of that divide, I’m comfortable with them,” he said.

That dual background shapes Apex’s legal strategy. “It means our legal strategy can be aligned not just with what is defensible in court, but with what is commercially viable over the long term,” he explained. “That perspective allows us to look at cases as investments.”

For Apex’s focus on smaller and mid-sized disputes, this approach is particularly important. “Success depends on managing complexity with precision,” he said. “That’s where alignment between legal reasoning and financial structure makes all the difference.”

Attracting the next generation

Olearnik is also an advocate for positioning litigation funding as a first-choice career path, rather than a later-stage transition. “The industry benefits enormously from the wisdom of practitioners who arrive with deep legal or financial backgrounds, but we also need fresh perspectives,” he said.

He believes that professionals who begin their careers in funding will think differently about how capital and law intersect. “Young professionals who start in litigation finance will think about risk, capital, and strategy in a more integrated way from the outset,” he said. “That creates the potential for a new generation of funders who aren’t defined by legacy assumptions about how law or finance should operate, but who build the industry around how it actually does operate.”

Navigating regulation with market discipline

Looking ahead, Olearnik sees regulatory clarity as one of the defining challenges for the next phase of the market. “As the industry matures, we need frameworks that give comfort to investors, counterparties, and courts alike,” he said.

At Apex, he aims to ensure the firm remains ahead of that curve. “Our focus will be on proving that we can do transactions with the same rigour as the capital markets, but with the responsiveness that clients expect from a litigation funder,” Olearnik said.

That balance between precision and agility—between the structure of finance and the creativity of law—will, in his view, define Apex’s next chapter.