046 Mani Walia: the lunch that launched a fund a decade later - trust, focus, and alignment

About this episode

Mani Walia discusses how trust, focus, and alignment shaped his journey from trial lawyer to launching a litigation fund.

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…

People in this episode

Host: Khurram Naik

Guest: Mani Walia

Topics covered

• trust
• focus
• alignment
• litigation fund
• career development

Keywords

• trust
• focus
• alignment
• litigation fund
• career challenges
• Texas trial lawyers
• operational excellence

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Susman Godfrey, Freshwater Counsel, Goodwin

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