Which isn’t entirely the fault of the schools. Litigation finance is a relatively new industry and schools have only started to come to grips with that reality. Harvard Law School now offers a course on litigation funding and the future of the legal profession and other schools are too — turns out that when an industry hits $16 billion and starts fundamentally reshaping how litigation gets financed, law schools eventually notice.

But courses and symposia can only get students so far. At some point, the way to learn how the money side of litigation works is to actually be in the room when funding decisions get made.

And there’s an opportunity for that now, with the Certum Group’s Litigation Finance Fellowship.

Now in its third year, the fellowship gives law students and business students a four-week, hands-on immersion in what it actually looks like when capital meets complex litigation. Fellows work closely with Certum’s legal, insurance, and finance professionals — analyzing case funding requests, modeling case resolution scenarios, participating in client development meetings, and preparing marketing collateral. It’s not a coffee-fetching internship. Past fellows have come from Penn Carey Law and Columbia Business School, and the program is designed — much like the MoloLamken Advocacy Academy for the trial advocacy inclined — to run after students have already completed a summer associateship or other internship, making it a second-summer add-on rather than a scheduling conflict.

The fellowship is led by William Marra, who heads Certum’s litigation finance strategy and serves on the board of the International Legal Finance Association. Marra is also a lecturer in law at Penn Carey Law, where he’s in his fourth year teaching litigation finance. He’s also co-hosting an academic symposium on litigation finance with the NYU Law Review on April 17. In other words, the guy running this program is the same guy law schools call when they want someone to talk to students about litigation finance. The fellowship is just getting that education wholesale.

Certum Group provides litigation finance, litigation insurance, and managed services organization capabilities under one roof, meaning fellows aren’t just learning one corner of the business, but gaining exposure to the full sausage-making process of how litigation risk gets assessed, priced, and transferred.

“Litigation finance and insurance are rapidly changing the legal landscape,” Marra said. “To succeed, lawyers need to understand not only doctrine but also finance. Law schools are beginning to reflect that shift, and students want to understand it. Our Summer Fellowship is about opening that door for both law and business students, and giving them meaningful exposure to the capital side of litigation.”

Nothing against legal academia, but there’s just no substitute for the practical training that can only be gained directly from those working in the field. With litigation financing becoming a larger and larger industry every year, the Certum fellowship attacks the gap between doctrinal education and figuring out how to finance justice in a world where resources have traditionally been stacked against victims.

The fellowship is based in New York City, though remote participation is available. Any law student or business student is eligible. Fellows receive a $3,000 cash award and Certum expects to employ one to three fellows depending on the applicant pool.

Applications are due March 31, 2026, and should include a resume, law school transcript, and a brief 250-word statement of interest. Send applications to SummerFellowship@CertumGroup.com.

If you’re a law student who wants to get in on the still comparatively early days of the financing industry, this is worth a look.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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Kite, the Santa Monica, California-based cell therapy subsidiary of Gilead, has entered a definitive agreement to pay $350 million cash to acquire startup Interius, the companies announced Thursday. The deal brings to Kite a cancer program in early clinical development as well as the platform technology that spawned it.

The first generation of cell therapies are cancer treatments made by harvesting a patient’s T cells, engineering and expanding them in a lab, then infusing them back into the patient. Kite has two FDA-approved CAR-T therapies for certain blood cancers, Yescarta and Tecartus. In 2017, Gilead paid $12 billion to acquire Kite.

The multi-step process of making ex vivo cell therapies is expensive and can take a month or more. In that time, a patient’s disease can advance. Before patients receive these cell therapies, they must undergo a preconditioning regimen that comes with complication risks. Kite has a large network of authorized treatment centers that efficiently produce its cell therapies. In a media briefing during the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January, Kite Executive Vice President Cindy Perettie boasted the company has the industry’s fastest turnaround time at 14 days for Yescarta. But an in vivo therapy offers the potential to bring treatment to patients even faster.

“In vivo therapy is a promising frontier with the potential to transform how we approach treating patients, shifting to more accessible and scalable solutions,” Perettie said in the acquisition announcement.

Philadelphia-based Interius is part of a group of young biotechs aiming to overcome the limitations of ex vivo cell therapy by manufacturing the therapeutic chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) cells in vivo — inside a patient’s own body. This approach avoids the manufacturing infrastructure associated with CAR-T therapies, shortens the timeline for a patient to receive the therapy, and eliminates the need for a preconditioning regimen.

Interius’s platform technology uses a lentiviral vector to target specific cells in the body, delivering to them genetic payloads that program the target cells to produce CAR cells. Lead therapeutic candidate INT2104 uses a single viral vector to target T cells and Natural Killer (NK) cells to yield CAR-T and CAR-NK cells programed to go after disease-driving B cells. Last fall, Interius began a Phase 1 test evaluating INT2104 as a potential treatment for blood cancers driven by malignant B cells. Preclinical data for this program was published in June in the journal Molecular Therapy.

The Interius pipeline also includes INT2106, which the biotech is developing as a way to reset the immune system to potentially treat a range of autoimmune diseases stemming from the production of autoantibodies. This preclinical therapeutic candidate leads to the in vivo production of CAR T and CAR NK cells to target disease-driving B cells that express the protein CD19. The targets and potential indications for a third program, the discovery-stage INT2108, remain undisclosed.

Gilead’s Interius acquisition follows other big pharma deals this year for in vivo cell therapy biotechs. In March, AstraZeneca agreed to buy privately held EsoBiotec for $425 million up front and another $575 million tied to the achievement of milestones. The Belgium-based biotech had reached early clinical development with lead program ESO-T01, an in vivo cell therapy for multiple myeloma.

In June, AbbVie agreed to acquire Capstan Therapeutics, a University of Pennsylvania spinout whose in vivo cell therapies are delivered to their destinations in the body encapsulated within lipid nanoparticles, which don’t prompt an immune response the way therapies delivered by viral vectors do. AbbVie committed to pay up to $2.1 billion without providing a financial breakdown of that figure. Capstan’s lead program, CPTX2309, is in Phase 1 testing as a potential treatment for B cell-mediated autoimmune disorders.

Interius was founded in 2019, based on the research of Saar Gill, a physician-scientist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Cellular Immunotherapies. In 2021, the Penn spinout announced a $76 million Series A round of financing co-led by Cormorant Asset Management and Fairmount Funds. Since inception, Interius says it has raised more than $141 million.

Leerink Partners takes a positive view of Gilead’s Interius acquisition. Analyst Daina Graybosch noted that Kite already has a presence in Philadelphia as well as a research and clinical relationship with Penn.

“We see real potential for in vivo approaches to disrupt ex vivo CAR-T, given large safety, [cost of goods sold], and access advantages should in vivo match ex vivo approaches on efficacy, and believe it is important for Kite to be part of the disruption,” Graybosch wrote in a note sent to investors.

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No financial breakdown was provided for the cash sum. But the deal announced Monday brings AbbVie a lead Capstan program that recently began a Phase 1 test in autoimmune disease as well as CellSeeker, the platform technology that produced it.

The first cell therapies to reach patients were CAR T-therapies, which are made by harvesting a patient’s own T cells and engineering them in a lab to go after a particular cancer target. After those cells are multiplied, they’re infused back into the patient. The entire process can take weeks, though many companies are working on ways to make it faster and more efficient. In vivo engineering of a patient’s immune cells would avoid this expensive, multi-step manufacturing process altogether.

The approach of San Diego-based Capstan uses messenger RNA to reprogram immune cells to go after disease-driving cells. The mRNA is encapsulated in a lipid nanoparticle. While viral vectors are a widely used delivery vehicle for genetic medicines, they are typically one-time treatments. These engineered viruses prompt the body to produce antibodies against them, so subsequent doses would be rendered ineffective. By contrast, a lipid nanoparticle does not prompt that immune response, making redosing possible. That’s important for bringing cell therapy to immunology, where treatment of chronic disease typically requires redosing.

Immunology and inflammation is already a strength of AbbVie, but the company has been looking to expand its prospects in this area as its blockbuster antibody drug Humira loses market share to biosimilar competition. The company is offsetting some of the revenue declines with Skyrizi, an antibody drug, and Rinvoq, an oral small molecule. Both products are expanding their labels to multiple immunology indications. Capstan brings a new modality to AbbVie’s immunology pipeline.

The most advanced Capstan program is CPTX2309, which is being developed as a treatment for B cell-mediated autoimmune disorders. The therapy is intended to deplete pathogenic memory B cells, enabling the immune system to repopulate with naïve B cells that don’t remember attacking healthy tissue. This approach could “reset” the immune system, potentially preventing disease progression or even leading to clinical remission.

In preclinical research presented at the recent annual meeting of the American Society of Cell & Gene Therapy, Capstan reported its CAR T-therapy led to in vivo engineering of immune cells followed by depletion of B cells in blood and tissues. Furthermore, the therapy did not require lymphodepletion, which is suppression of the immune system. This preconditioning helps ensure the engineered cells are taken up by the body. It’s a required step of ex vivo CAR T-therapies for cancer.

A Phase 1 test of CPTX2309 is underway enrolling healthy volunteers. While the main goals are to assess safety and efficacy, the trial could also show signs of how the therapy is working. Secondary study goals include measuring levels of components of CPTX2309 and levels of circulating B cells.

William Blair analyst Matt Phipps spoke with AbbVie management, who said a preliminary look at data from the Phase 1 study show “patients achieving rapid and robust B-cell depletion, which provides some clinical validation of CPTX2309,” he wrote in a note sent to investors. While this program is still in early clinical development, William Blair believes the acquisition demonstrates AbbVie’s strategic effort to strengthen its immunology franchise with novel, disease-modifying approaches.

“Given the stage of development, this asset clearly comes with clinical risk, but given the potential of in vivo CAR-T, which does not require lymphodepletion and has potential for greater manufacturing scalability, it offers significant long-term upside if successful,” Phipps said.

Capstan’s co-founders include Carl June, a professor of immunotherapy at Penn who developed Kymriah, which under Novartis became the first FDA-approved CAR T-therapy. Drew Weissman, a Penn professor in vaccine research and an expert in mRNA, is another Capstan co-founder. The startup launched in 2022, revealing $165 million raised to date. Capstan last raised money in 2024, a $175 million Series B round of funding. Besides its lead program for B cell-mediated autoimmune disease, Capstan’s pipeline includes preclinical in vivo CAR T-programs in development for plasma cell disorders and fibrotic disorders.

Other companies in various stages of development with CAR T-therapies for autoimmune disease include Kyverna Therapeutics and Autolus Therapeutics, albeit with therapies that are made ex vivo. Clinical-stage startup Umoja Biopharma has technology for in vivo CAR T-therapies. Last year, AbbVie licensed an Umoja in vivo CAR T-program in development for blood cancers. Umoja has another in vivo CAR T-program for autoimmune diseases in development under a partnership with Iaso Biotherapeutics.

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Six years later, of course, Penn’s campus—along with dozens of others across the country and world—erupted into protest over Israel’s at best less-than-ideal concern for civilian casualties in its war with Hamas. Infuriated over Penn’s refusal to deploy I.D.F. tactics against its own students who happened to disagree with Stevens on the matter, Ross decided to renege on that promise, depriving the Wharton School of yet another nebulous initiative for the creation of more Ross Stevenses and the greater glory of Ross Stevens.

The alleged antisemitism of the Penn protests gave Stevens a high-minded excuse for depriving a school with $21 billion in the bank of $100 million it doesn’t need for another hedge-fund-manager factory it definitely doesn’t need. But Stevens perhaps doesn’t require such a noble pretext for allegedly welshing on a large financial commitment.

[Former Stone Ridge head of client strategies Erick] Goralski, who had previously done stints as a banker at Deutsche Bank and Lehman Brothers, claims in the Aug. 2 complaint in New York state court that Stevens reneged on the pact to pay him fat bonuses over a six-year period as high as $50 million a year…./After Goralski left Stone Ridge in 2018, Stevens promised to pay him a $4.4 million windfall in 2019, following up with a payout of $9 million the following year and $10 million the year after that, Goralski’s lawsuit claims./But Goralski gripes that he allegedly only picked up $700,000 in 2019 from Stevens before the money dried up…. Court filings claim their relationship “soured” over a “longstanding dispute” over the “treatment of equity for co-founders and key early hires.”

Hedge fund boss who yanked $100M UPenn gift over antisemitism sued for ‘millions in unpaid bonuses’ [N.Y. Post]

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The debate over what, exactly, is insider trading rages on. And in that semantic disputation, Gary Gensler and the Securities and Exchange Commission are on the offensive. Our old friend Matt Levine is fond of pointing out that “everything is securities fraud.” Given that insider trading is simply a type of securities fraud, Gensler & co. seem determined to apply the transitive property and demonstrate that everything is also insider trading. Blank-check companies? Insider trading. Short selling? Insider trading. Activist investing? Insider trading. Block trading? Insider trading.

Now, however, the SEC is making arguably its most avant-garde, boundary-bending insider-trading argument yet, arguably even more so than its recent failed attempt to show insider trading requires no evidence of having insider information: That trading one stock when in possession of inside dirt on another is insider-trading.

Defense lawyers have dubbed [Matthew] Panuwat’s case the first involving “shadow insider trading,” a label that describes executives making well-timed bets in the shares of other companies. The SEC alleges Panuwat purchased options tied to the shares of Incyte, a rival drugmaker, because he knew they would pay off when the market heard was buying his company, Medivation, in 2016…. “I do think this is a push of the law and they are seeing if they can get a court to bless what is a bit of a stretch of the existing parameters,” [law professor Karen] Woody said of the SEC’s case.

The SEC’s case rests on three points. The first is that Medivation barred its employees from trading even other stocks when in possession of material non-public information about Medivation. Company policy, of course, is not securities law, but presumably this one stems from fact two: Peer stocks are historically correlated, and so even though Pfizer wasn’t buying Incyte, the market was likely to react as though it were, at least for a little while. And, finally and crucially, there’s timing: Panuwat allegedly bought up a whole bunch of Incyte options—and while Panuwat, a former investment banker, was known to play in other biotech stocks, he hadn’t done much options trading—about seven minutes after he found out about the Pfizer deal. And that looks good enough to cook Panuwat’s goose according to one scholar of shadow insider trading.

Panuwat’s case shows that “if you have information about one company, based on the historical correlation, you also have information about the other,” [University of Pennsylvania professor Daniel] Taylor said. “If the SEC loses, it’s only because there is a hesitation about extending the jurisdiction of insider trading to peer companies. I don’t think they lose on the facts.”

Of course, now that a judge has said that Panuwat will have to answer those allegations, he’s got to come up with some facts to explain what does look like a rather extraordinary set of coincidences. And he’s giving it a go, noting that word of a deal (although, crucially, not the deal itself) had leaked months earlier (although, crucially, Panuwat didn’t buy his options months earlier, but only after learning, in a material non-public way, about the deal), and also that he had a lot going on at the time and therefore didn’t read or remember an e-mail he’d gotten seven minutes earlier because he had a lot going on that day.

He also said he was distracted by life events and didn’t remember getting the CEO’s email. Panuwat’s son has special needs and was hospitalized at the time in Oakland, he told regulators last year in a deposition. And he was about to take his daughter, who had just turned 10 years old, to Las Vegas to see the Hoover Dam.

Ah, yes, the old Hoover Dam argument. A sure winner in court. Gary Gensler’s gonna regret taking on someone with such an iron-clad defense.

An Executive Bought a Rival’s Stock. The SEC Says That’s Insider Trading. [WSJ]

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Apollo Global Management Inc. has appointed former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton to the newly created role of lead independent director on its board, the latest step in a sweeping overhaul of corporate governance at the investment firm….

Mr. Clayton said he looks forward to serving public investors in the role, adding that he supports Apollo’s transition to “a more shareholder-oriented governance model.”

“Over the last two decades Apollo has been at the forefront of the allocation of capital,” he said. “Our markets are going to change, and they want to be part of that.” He is slated to assume his role at the firm on March 1.

Now that a certain someone’s promised to be on his best behavior, and anyway won’t be having much to do with the firm anymore going forward because he wasn’t in the past, keeping those tabs is apparently not as taxing a job as it might initially appear.

Mr. Clayton, who stepped down from his role at the SEC in December, will also return to Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, where he was a partner before entering government…. Mr. Clayton also plans to return as an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

Apollo Names Ex-SEC Chairman Jay Clayton as Lead Independent Director [WSJ]

In my experience, the former is definitely not true, failing, as it does, to account for all of the recruited athletes, marketing majors and Trump progeny stumbling around Steiny-D. As for the second, we have numbers to back it up, and it’s not true, either: Neither Penn as a whole or Wharton in particular is the hardest school to get into. They're not even the hardest schools in Philadelphia to get into; that accolade belongs to the Curtis Institute of Music, which accepts a slightly smaller percentage of applicants than Stanford, the actual hardest school in the country to get into. Penn’s acceptance rate is also significantly higher than those of Harvard and Columbia, the two schools Trump’s famously stupid predecessor attended. And while Wharton boasts a marginally lower admit rate than the university as a whole, it still takes a larger portion of applicants than Brown. Brown!

And that’s today. Back when Trump got in, in 1966, Penn was even more a glorified commuter school that took just about anyone with a pulse and a checkbook. Don’t believe me? Well, maybe you’ll believe the guy who got Trump into Wharton.

At the time, Nolan said, more than half of applicants to Penn were accepted, and transfer students such as Donald Trump had an even higher acceptance rate based on their college experience…. “It was not very difficult,” Nolan said of the time Trump applied in 1966, adding: “I certainly was not struck by any sense that I’m sitting before a genius. Certainly not a super genius.”

And, in spite of the general lack of difficulty, Trump’s family still thought he’d require a bit of extra help.

James Nolan was working in the University of Pennsylvania’s admissions office in 1966 when he got a phone call from one of his closest friends, Fred Trump Jr. It was a plea to help Fred’s younger brother Donald Trump get into Penn’s Wharton School….

Soon, Donald Trump arrived at Penn for the interview, accompanied by his father, Fred Trump Sr., who sought to “ingratiate” himself, Nolan said…. Nolan, who spoke to The Post recently at his apartment here, said that “I’m sure” the family hoped he could help get Trump into Wharton.

There’s much more in that WaPo article about Trump’s lies about both Wharton and his own career at Wharton (hint: he didn’t actually graduate at, or even all that near, the top of his class, and—true to form—did the bare minimum to graduate at all), but if you want to read it you’ll have to make the president angry and give some money to his enemy Jeff Bezos (harder school to get into ’86). That’s all in the past. Also, more recently, one of Trump’s fellow super-geniuses, former Wharton dean and current Philadelphia Fed chief Patrick Harker (who has not one but four degrees from Penn, for what it’s worth, which, as we’ve mentioned, isn’t much) is wondering how Trump ever passed macroeconomics.

Mr. Harker said he supported the decision to hold rates steady at last month’s Fed policy meeting and projected no change in them this year. “The U.S. economy continues to be strong,” he said in an interview Monday. Average hiring in recent months shows “we still have a very strong labor market.”

Mr. Harker would entertain rate cuts if he believed “the economy was weakening substantially, which at this point, I do not see that,” he said. “There’s no immediate need to move rates in either direction at this point in my view….”

Mr. Harker said the undershoot of inflation below the Fed’s 2% target is a concern, but he added, “It’s one that I don’t see as an imminent crisis, and I think we can give it some time to move back up to 2%.”

Trump has referred to his Wharton degree as ‘super genius stuff.’ An admissions officer recalls it differently. [WaPo]
Philadelphia Fed’s Harker Sees No Need for Interest-Rate Changes [WSJ]