Judgment Enforcement & Asset Recovery

Led by a Chambers Band 1-ranked attorney, our judgment enforcement and asset recovery practice is among the most highly regarded in the world. We have been in a leader in this space for more than 25 years. We enforce and collect on judgments won through hard-fought arbitration and litigation. A favorable judgment or award is just the first hurdle. Collecting the money can often be even more challenging. We skillfully navigate various domestic and international laws to enforce judgments, including against foreign governments.

We have won and enforced arbitral awards and judgments for our clients in the eight-, nine-, and even 10-figure range that have been enforced both in the United States and abroad.

The best way to enforce a judgment is to secure assets while a claim is pending well before the judgment. We have used these methods with great success. One example is our work for ExxonMobil against Venezuela. We obtained a series of attachments and freezing orders worldwide for ExxonMobil before an arbitral award was issued, including attaching over US$300 million in cash in a proceeding in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The frozen funds were released – with interest – to ExxonMobil in partial satisfaction of an arbitral award. Recounting the episode in his book Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll wrote, "For the Steptoe attorneys the late-December Friday afternoon seizure of $300 million belonging to Hugo Chávez’s government was like hitting a walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth before a full house at Yankee Stadium."

Recently, Steptoe represented SourceHOV Holdings LLC in a judgment enforcement litigation stemming from the merger that created Exela Technologies. In May 2021, a Delaware vice chancellor refused to dismiss a judgment creditor's suit seeking traditional and "reverse" corporate veil piercing against Exela and its subsidiaries in order to collect on a $60 million-plus-interest merger stock appraisal award. This was the first case in which reverse veil piercing was permitted in Delaware, and has been closely watched by national media outlets, including Bloomberg Law, Law360, Levin Insights, and Reuters. The Steptoe team also obtained the appointment of a receiver in a Dallas, Texas court over the debtor’s property.

Steptoe is also presently involved in groundbreaking efforts to collect against sovereign states, including Cuba, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and Venezuela. Steptoe also represented Motorola in its claims against the Uzan family, which formerly owned the Turkish telecom company Telsim, concerning fraudulent conduct in connection with a $2 billion loan. Our team obtained a worldwide freezing order in the London commercial courts and obtained a fully contested fraud judgment for $2.13 billion in compensatory damages and a punitive damages judgment for $1 billion in federal court in New York City, and obtained an ICC arbitration award for $2 billion. See, e.g., Ben Hallman, Turkish Bath, American Lawyer (Winter 2007); David Segal, Bidders Vie for Family’s Ill-Gotten Digs, Wash. Po. at C1 (Nov. 11, 2004).

In addition, Steptoe represents clients in asset protection cases defending against judgment enforcement.

Our Winning Approach

We are able to successfully enforce judgments and secure assets through a multistep process that includes:

• Searching for pre-judgment remedies to secure assets, which can often be obtained in support of a court action and/or arbitration in certain litigations. We have developed good working relationships with investigators whose experience is often crucial to successful enforcement when debtors take steps to hide their assets.
• Seeking enforcement of court judgments in various courts across the globe by seeking assets either in the name of the judgment-debtor or against other parties who hold those assets through attempts to camouflage what is owned by the debtor.
• Undertaking enforcement actions in commercial and investor-state arbitrations pursuant to the 1958 New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards as adopted and implemented in the state of enforcement or under other international agreements, including the ICSID Convention.