Twenty-three years ago, in January 2003, two brothers saw something broken hiding in plain sight. H.H. Spooner Phillips IV, CSSC and Cory Phillips, CSSC were not chasing hype or headlines. They were watching families walk out of courtrooms with life-changing settlements and no real continuity to protect what came next. Structured settlements here. Trusts over there. Wealth managers somewhere else. Law firms stuck stitching it together while families absorbed the risk. The Forge Companies was built in Atlanta, Georgia to fix that fracture, not with slogans, but with structure.
What started as Forge Consulting, a national insurance agency focused on structured settlements and annuities, became something rarer over time. An integrated platform that shows up early in the legal process and stays long after the verdict ink dries. Structured settlement planning. Wealth management. Trust administration. Law firm financial operations. Four disciplines that usually argue across invoices now operating as one coordinated system. Not theory. 20+ years of execution, 130+ professionals, national reach, and a client base that includes more than 1,000 families navigating the hardest financial moments of their lives.
That context matters because The Forge Companies announced a strategic partnership with TA Associates. No numbers flashed. No valuation theater. Just a clear signal. TA Associates, founded in 1968 with $65 billion raised and more than 560 growth investments, does not back stories. It backs durable machines. This is the first institutional investment in Forge, a founder-led business that scaled organically for more than two decades before inviting a partner into the room.
The platform underneath the headline is already carrying weight. Advocacy Trust administers over $1 billion in assets. Advocacy Wealth Management, combined with Montag & Caldwell, oversees more than $2.5 billion in client assets as of August 2024. Forge Capital supports plaintiff firms with fee deferral, lien solutions, IOLTA accounting, and operational finance that actually respects how contingency law works. This is not a bundle. It is a system designed to remove friction where mistakes cost families decades.
Leadership has been the quiet multiplier. H.H. Spooner Phillips IV and Cory Phillips are still building. David Paventi runs operations and technology with the discipline of someone who has seen scale fail before. Peter H. Wayne IV aligns revenue with reality, not volume. Jay J. Butler keeps the financial spine tight. Kathryn M. Maloney makes trust administration feel human instead of procedural. This is not charisma management. It is muscle memory.
TA Associates is backing people, technology, and infrastructure so this model can reach more families and more firms without losing its center. The settlement world has been fragmented for generations. Integration is not flashy. It is relentless. And once you feel what continuity actually does, you stop asking who else is in the room and start asking how far this platform can go from here.
