Impact Spotlight: Aristata Capital and Capricorn Investment Group
Aristata is a sustainable financial platform created to fund commercial litigation with measurable Social and Environmental Impact (SEI) principles.
Aristata is on a mission to create a safer and more equitable world by financing legal cases that empower historically marginalized voices, equalize unjust power dynamics, and catalyze systemic change. Using a proprietary impact framework, the firm is identifying and investing in a diversified portfolio of litigation cases across a range of sectors — including climate change, human rights, justice reform, gender and race equality, shareholder, and indigenous rights where law can be used as a potent tool for social and environmental progress. It will also seek to close the justice gap, which refers to people with unmet justice needs that do not have access to adequate legal representation in a legal system where resource inequality heavily favors powerful commercial interests.
Aristata combines the characteristics of an exciting and well-established asset class, traditional litigation funding, with the impact strategy more often used in social justice or civil society driven litigation to identify and fund impactful commercial litigation. Capricorn’s Sustainable Investment Fund (SIF) will partner with the Aristata team to assist in the creation of this new approach to litigation funding and believes that it can leverage its extensive network across foundations, philanthropists, and activists in helping to originate and pursue litigation cases with positive and measurable impacts. Individual examples include upholding the economic rights of a regional council which represents the interest of indigenous communities against a commercial shipping line; or protecting West African fishing communities affected by spills from oil pipelines.
Corporations which see a substantive likelihood and cost of correcting these externalities and will not take the risk of ignoring them. Instead, they will have to reassess their commercial stance, change their behavior, and take responsibility for the damage caused by their actions. At scale, the impact litigation model holds the potential to deeply change the way corporations and other institutions account for externalities across a wide spectrum of geographies and environmental and social issues, driving behavior change by leveling the financial playing field for impacted claimants.
Key Issue Areas
Impact Roadmap
Strong Partnership
“Our goal is to fund cases that have scalable impact, which will result in a successful blueprint for those standing up against powerful defendants to use across a whole range of issues. Capricorn’s proven commitment to environmental and social justice combined with their expertise and extensive network will help Aristata to better leverage our litigation expertise and maximize the positive impact which can be achieved across our portfolio. We are very excited for the road ahead.”
-Rob Ryan, Founder and CEO, Aristata
“We are excited to partner with Aristata Capital to apply the model of litigation finance to cases that generate environmental and social gains in addition to legal payouts. We believe the alignment of principles will serve a model for good, not only for the future of the litigation finance industry, but ultimately by ensuring organizations across the globe are held accountable, take responsibility for their own actions and stop violating the rights of others”
-Eric Techel, CFO, Capricorn Investment Group & Aristata Board Member
