Patrick Grimes lost everything in 2009 and 2010. He was a snot-nosed engineer out of college, indexed all-in on a pre-development real estate deal with a personal guarantee. The market turned. The advice he had ignored, from the founder of his old machine design firm, kept coming back: "Don't put everything in high tech. If you want a financial future for your family, take your high money and your high tech and dump it in alternatives." Patrick spent the next decade and a half rebuilding around that one sentence.

Today he runs Passive Investing Mastery, a fund that gives accredited investors access to litigation finance, an asset class that until recently required twenty-million-dollar minimums. The Passive Investing Mastery fund opens at $100,000.

What landed in this conversation:

1. What litigation finance actually is. Mass-tort attorneys representing thousands of harmed individuals (Camp Lejeune Marines, paraquat-exposed farmers, sexual assault survivors of the LA Juvenile Detention system, Roundup plaintiffs) often hit a working-capital wall in late-stage cases. The case is near settlement, the science is in, the case law is precedent, but they need another one to five million dollars to extend the claimant pool or carry expert witness costs. Patrick's fund underwrites the docket the way a real estate investor underwrites an apartment building, gets a loan-to-value position with a lien, and participates in the settlement waterfall.
2. Why "late stage" matters. Patrick avoids speculative early-stage cases. His fund engages once discovery is done, misconduct is documented, and either a settlement framework exists or case law has already priced similar outcomes. That puts the realistic settlement timeline at two to five years (front-loaded), not the open-ended decades of big commercial appeals. Camp Lejeune is the cleanest example: a 17-year harm window, a passed law providing a settlement grant based on condition and exposure, and an underwritable payout.
3. The structure he uses. Not a straight loan. A prepaid forward contract, which returns as capital gains rather than interest. Lien against the case the same way a deed secures a property. Waterfall payback: the fund gets made whole plus a return before attorneys collect their 20-to-40 percent fee, then participates in upside if the settlement outperforms underwriting.
4. Why this asset class is non-correlated. Patrick puts up legal industry charts next to the dollar, gold, oil, the S&P, and real estate. The first four roller-coaster. Legal goes straight up and to the right. People sue more in booms. They sue more in busts. The market does not care. For an investor trying to build resilience instead of riding multifamily cycles, this is the kind of allocation private equity and sovereign funds have used for decades. Now it is accessible at the accredited level.

The book that reshaped Patrick's last year: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. He says it changed how he treats the one input fully under his control. Pairs it with a Whoop band for daily sleep, recovery, and biological age tracking.

Reach Patrick at investwithpatrick.com (PDF list of his favorite alternatives) or grab his book Lessons from Thought Leaders at passiveinvestingmastery.com/book.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

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