Willis Towers Watson is a global insurance broker founded in 2016. Its litigation and contingent risk team create bespoke insurance solutions for litigation funders, law firms and corporates, offering a full suite of litigation insurance products. With particular expertise in competition law (including Competition Appeal Tribunal proceedings), shareholder disputes, group actions and arbitrations, the firm boasts considerable global reach, allowing it to operate across a variety of jurisdictions. Recent work includes a first-of-its-kind defendant-side portfolio on behalf of a Cayman Islands company. Executive director Jonathan Simon leads the litigation and contingent risk practice. Katherine Hemsley, James Burke and Tom Hunt and Rachel Bennet are all directors within the team in the London office.
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Testimonials
Collated independently by Legal 500 research team.
- WTW is a great partner. They are very well connected to and respected by insurers and MGAs and offer excellent tailored insurance solutions. If a product does not exist yet, they find a way to create it.
- Jonathan Simon is amazing. He is exceptionally responsive, creative, hardworking, and loyal. He is willing to take the long-term, big-picture view to get new product lines off the ground. Our venture would have failed but for the creative solutions Jonathan brought to the table. The high regard in which he is held by insurers and MGAs pays huge dividends for his clients. If he doubled his fees, he would still be great value. I cannot recommend him highly enough.
- Jonathan Simon is highly experienced in placing complex deals and is someone that large clients in the industry can undoubtedly rely on when needed.
- Willis Towers Watson is well-sourced to deliver value to its clients both in terms of presenting complex risk in an understandable way and in delivering large amounts of insurance capacity to its clients. It is consistently able to place very large deals in the market and is at the forefront of a large percentage of the most important placements in the litigation finance industry.
Work highlights
WTW arranged a £200m adverse‑costs insurance portfolio covering our client’s large pipeline of contentious matters. The portfolio included 56 individually underwritten policies, among them cover for one of the largest litigations in UK history. By cross‑collateralising risk across the portfolio, WTW secured material premium efficiencies, delivering the largest ATE portfolio placement ever completed in the UK market.
WTW created and placed a first‑of‑its‑kind defendant‑side programme combining ATE, Own Costs and Contingent Cover for a Cayman Islands company defending claims brought by a shareholder group. The $175m structure represented the insurance market’s first deployment of this risk type, enabling the client to resist pressure for early settlement in a claim valued at approximately $1bn.
WTW designed and placed a $390m CPI wrapper across a portfolio of 400+ disputes, supporting a US litigation funder seeking to attract new institutional investors unfamiliar with litigation finance. The structure incorporated a capital‑call‑linked premium mechanism, aligning the cost of cover with the funder’s funding cycle.
Practice head
Jonathan Simon