A leading voice in arbitration, litigation funding, and the future of the legal profession.
Areas of Expertise
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Professor Steinitz is a leading authority on the financing of legal claims and the evolving economics of law firms, with deep expertise at the intersection of capital, governance, and professional responsibility.
Her work examines the economics, law, and ethics of these fast-evolving markets, including prevailing market practices and the ways technological change is reshaping risk, incentives, and control. -
Analyzes how structural forces—including financialization, technology, and regulatory change—are transforming the legal profession.
Her work focuses on what these shifts mean for leaders and their teams, helping decision-makers anticipate change rather than react to it. -
Professor Steinitz works at the intersection of international arbitration, transnational litigation, and the negotiation and mediation of public international law disputes, with experience across multiple legal systems, institutions, and languages.
Her expertise spans sovereign representation in public and private international law disputes and complex cross-border litigation involving multinational actors—bringing comparative insight shaped by work across civil-law, common-law, and mixed legal traditions. -
She brings deep expertise in class and mass actions, including their procedural complexity, economic dynamics, and governance challenges.
Her work examines how aggregate litigation operates in practice—how claims are structured, financed, resolved, and overseen—and what these cases mean for risk exposure, valuation, and strategic decision-making in high-stakes disputes.
About Maya Steinitz
Professor Maya Steinitz teaches civil procedure and international law at Boston University Law School and litigation finance and the future of the legal profession at Harvard Law School. A leading expert on litigation and law firm finance, she is also a senior international arbitrator, consultant, keynote speaker, and expert witness.
Her scholarship has been published in leading journals at Yale, Harvard, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, and Vanderbilt Law Schools, as well as Oxford University. Professor Steinitz has been interviewed and cited by scores of leading news outlets globally, including CBS 60 Minutes, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, NBC, NPR, The Atlantic, Chicago Tribune, Reuters, Bloomberg, and The American Lawyer.
Professor Steinitz is widely sought after for her expertise in litigation finance. She regularly advises AmLaw 100 law firms, funders, investors, and Fortune 500 corporations on issues including contract drafting, economics and ethics, regulatory developments, and industry trends and practices. Her upcoming book, “Litigation finance, law firm ownership, and the future of the legal profession” will be published by Cambridge University Press.
A highly respected scholar of international dispute resolution, Professor Steinitz is a seasoned practitioner with extensive experience in both private and public law. In private dispute resolution, she has served in over 100 arbitrations, presiding as chair and solo arbitrator, and serving as a panelist, member of court, counsel, expert, and consultant. Representative matters include complex multibillion-dollar commercial disputes, sensitive NATO contracting, and a maritime boundary dispute. She was a Member of the ICC Commission on Arbitration and served on the inaugural bench of the Israeli-Palestinian ICC Jerusalem Arbitration Center (JAC). While in private practice, she led the representation of the emerging government of Southern Sudan in drafting its national and sub-national constitutions and provided legal advice on various aspects of the Sudanese peace process, in a representation which The American Lawyer described as “one of the most ambitious international pro bono undertaking ever by a commercial law firm.” Professor Steinitz is also the author of “The Case for an International Court of Civil Justice” (Cambridge University Press 2019), a highly regarded work on transnational mass tort litigation.
Before joining academia, Professor Steinitz served as a litigator at Latham & Watkins, LLP (2003-2009) and Flemming, Zulack & Williamson LLP (2001-2002). She also clerked for the Hon. Esther Hayut, former Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court (1998-1999). Professor Steinitz holds a Doctor of Juridical Science (JSD ’05) and Master of Law (LLM ’00) from New York University School of Law and a Bachelor of Laws (LLB ’99) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.