Lecturer Bios
William C. Marra, Esq.
William C. Marra is an Investment Manager at Validity.
A former law clerk at the United States Supreme Court, Will has been recognized as a Global Leader in Litigation Finance by Lawdragon. He is a frequent writer and speaker on litigation finance, and his article The Shadows of Litigation Finance was published by the Vanderbilt Law Review in April 2021.
Will is responsible for sourcing investment opportunities from the country’s leading lawyers and claimholders, and he is also actively engaged in Validity’s due diligence and investment underwriting process. He offers Validity’s clients his expertise as a former commercial and constitutional litigator at Cooper & Kirk, PLLC, as well as his experience working at Bain & Company, the business consulting firm.
Will graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. In addition to clerking for Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Will also clerked for Chief Judge William H. Pryor, Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. During college, he served as President of The Harvard Crimson, the University’s daily newspaper.
Along with spending time with his wife and son, Will is a board member of the United States Soccer Foundation’s Young Professionals Council, and he volunteers as a mentor with Bottom Line.
Peter Petyt
Peter Petyt specializes in financial and strategic solutions for the legal services sector, advising on third-party funding for litigation and arbitration, helping law firms with strategic financial advice, and providing consultancy for stakeholders in the sector. After qualifying as a Chartered Accountant in 1989 and then spending a number of years in industry, Peter became a corporate finance advisor in 2001. During the following 12 years Peter originated and executed a number of lead advisory deals in Europe and the Middle East.
In 2013 he was appointed CEO of a legal services group, where he made three acquisitions, headed a strategic origination drive, and prepared the business for sale. In 2015 Peter accepted an interim role with a UK litigation funder to work on its origination strategy and the following year 2016 he established a litigation finance consultancy, 4 Rivers, which now advises on a range of requirements in the legal services sector in the US, UK and elsewhere, including dispute finance, legal case management and law firm finance and M & A.
Peter was recently awarded a Master’s in Civil Litigation and Dispute Resolution with commendation at City University, London, achieving an 80% mark in his dissertation on litigation finance, and he is now continuing with part-time doctoral research into portfolio funding for law firms at the University of Westminster in London.
