046 Mani Walia: the lunch that launched a fund a decade later - trust, focus, and alignment
Khurram's Quorum · Khurram Naik
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Show Notes
When Mani was an associate at Susman Godfrey, he took a new colleague out for lunch for a vulnerable conversation about the demands of elite practice.
A decade later, Mani's lunch friend was now a rainmaker - and Mani was who he called for funding.
In this episode, we explore how Mani has used principles of trust, focus, and alignment to go from trial lawyer to GC of a multi-strategy fund to launching a litigation fund:
- Trust
- being trusted as a peer trial lawyer created the relationships that led to the fund
- the intangibles become the tangibles
- Focus
- focusing on Texas trial lawyers creates operational excellence
- it also enables them to act faster on decaying assets using limited information
- Alignment
- aligning upside and downside with firms creates a flywheel for trust and repeatability
- it also allows them to take risks others shy from
About the host:
Khurram Naik is a partner at Freshwater Counsel, a boutique recruiting agency focused on patent litigators. Before founding the agency, he practiced patent litigation at Goodwin. Khurram hosts Khurram’s Quorum, a podcast with in-depth conversations with federal judges, first-chair trial lawyers, and chief legal officers on their career challenges and successes. Khurram also shares insights on LinkedIn.