As an integral complement to our commercial practice we also represent foreign clients in their commercial disputes before the Spanish courts and arbitral institutions. Additionally, we have extensive experience in obtaining the recognition and enforcement in Spain of foreign court judgments and arbitral awards.
We have represented past clients in all types of commercial disputes including, breach of contract, distribution and agency agreements, unfair competition, technology and intellectual property licensing and host of others. Our win rate is practically 100% as we normally do not recommend bringing suits that are not winners and tend to guide our clients to settlement when they are defending weak cases.
Our approach to litigation is dispute minimization. In other words, we evaluate the strength of our client’s case and then seek to reach a negotiated settlement with the opposing party before engaging in litigation. Although litigation tends to be less drawn out and expensive than in the United States and other common law countries, it is nonetheless time-consuming and costly. A client must weigh the strength of his case, the costs of settlement and those of a trial and possible appeal. The client must also consider, if it intends to bring a suit, whether the defendant is solvent and will have sufficient assets to pay the amount of a successful judgment. Typically, before bringing a suit for a client, we carry out a full background economic evaluation to determine whether the defendant is currently operational, the type of assets it has and whether the latter might easily be put out of reach in the event of a judgment in favor of our client. In the latter case, we may even advise our clients to obtain pre-litigation protective measures before the courts to ensure that those assets remain available.
Commercial litigation in Spain varies somewhat from its United States and other common law counterparts and we have summarized some of the more important points of Spanish litigation to allow our clients to better inform themselves.
