The most expensive thing in a dispute is usually an assumption nobody stopped to test: about the forum, about the evidence, or about who the counterparty actually is.

We are typically engaged at the point where a commercial disagreement has hardened into a live dispute but proceedings have not yet been issued. Recent matters in this posture include a shareholder dispute and injunction proceedings, an MoU dispute requiring a legal notice and forum analysis before any filing, an international debt-recovery action, and a court-referral matter where the right forum was the first contested question.

The work at this point is mostly a series of choices: jurisdiction, governing law, the forum that fits the asset map and the urgency, the evidence to preserve before it disappears, and correspondence pitched to protect the client's position without escalating before they are ready. Most of those decisions are cheap to make now and expensive to revisit later.

Once the path is chosen, we keep the strategy consistent across the court, arbitration, regulatory and settlement workstreams, so that what the client says to counterparties, tribunals and authorities is the same in each place.