The Kodacell experiment recognized one fundamental truth: it's easy to turn ten thousand into two hundred thousand, but much harder to turn ten million into two hundred million. Scaling an investment up to gigascale is so hard, it's nearly impossible. But a new paradigm in investment that's unfolding around us that might actually solve the problem: venture-financed litigation. Twenty or thirty million sunk into litigation can bankrupt a twenty billion-dollar firm, transferring to the investors whatever assets remain after legal fees. It sounds crazy, and only time will tell whether it proves to be sustainable. But the founder of the strategy, Landon Kettlewell, has struck gold for his investors more than once -- witness the legendary rise and fall of Kodacell, the entity that emerged from the merger of Kodak and Duracell. Investors in the first two rounds and the IPO on Kodacell brought home 30X returns in three years (of course, investors who stayed in too long came away with nothing). Meanwhile, Kettlewell's bid to take down Disney Parks looks good -- the legal analysis of the vexatious litigation and unfair competition charges have legal scholars arguing and adding up the zeros. Most damning is the number of former Disney Parks employees (or "castmembers" in the treacly dialect of the Magic Kingdom) who've posted information about the company's long-term plan to sabotage Kettlewell's clients. Likewise fascinating is the question of whether the jury will be able to distinguish between Disney Parks, whose corporate citizenship is actually pretty good, from Disney Products, whose record has been tainted by a string of disastrous child-labor, safety, and design flaws (astute readers will be thinking of the "flammable pajamas" flap of last year, and CEO Robert Montague's memorable words, "Parents who can't keep their kids away from matches have no business complaining about *our* irresponsibility"). Punitive jury awards are a wild-card in this kind of litigation, but given the trends in recent years, things look bad for Disney Parks. Bottom line: should your portfolio include a litigation-investment component? Yes, unequivocally. While risky and slow to mature, litigation-investments promise a staggering return on investment not seen in decades. A million or two carefully placed with the right litigation fund could pay off enough to make it all worthwhile. This is creative destruction at its finest: the old dinosaurs like Disney Parks are like rich seams of locked-away capital begging to be liquidated and put to work at nimbler firms. How can you tell if you've got the right fund? Come back next week, when we'll have a Q&A with a litigation specialist at Credit Suisse/First Boston. # "There's litigation specialists at Credit Suisse?"