The decision of which law firm should run a matter is at least as consequential as the decision of whether to bring the action in the first place. Most digital-asset matters cross at least one border, frequently more, and the right counsel for a Bitcoin-clearing case in the Southern District of New York is rarely the right counsel for a token-marketplace matter argued in the District of Delaware or coordinated across an EU member state.

How we select counsel

Counsel selection is matter-specific. Selection criteria include established practice in:

  • Federal civil-recovery litigation under the relevant statutory provisions.
  • Cross-border asset-tracing actions, including disclosure-order practice in jurisdictions with established cooperative regimes.
  • Digital-asset characterization litigation — security, commodity, property, or unregistered offering — under both US federal regimes and EU regulatory regimes.
  • Marketplace, custodian, and exchange-facing litigation.
  • Mass-claimant coordination, including the structural mechanics of representing victim cohorts at scale.

The engagement architecture

Counsel is retained by the claimant or the victim cohort directly, under written engagement agreements they review independently. Our role — structuring the engagement, conducting the forensic record, and coordinating the work-product against that record — is documented separately and disclosed transparently to the claimant before any meaningful resources are committed. The two roles operate in parallel and are integrated under a single engagement architecture from intake to disposition.

The clean separation of roles between forensic coordinator and retained counsel is not a procedural formality. It is what protects the integrity of the recovery itself.

What integrated coordination looks like in practice

Counsel and the forensic team work from the same evidentiary record. The forensic reconstruction is delivered in a form that counsel can rely on for pleadings, motion practice, and trial; counsel’s strategic decisions feed back into forensic priorities (which counterparties to develop further, which off-ramps to attribute first, which clusters to authenticate ahead of motion deadlines). The coordination is iterative throughout the life of the matter.

Why coordination matters in cross-border matters

Cross-border matters fail more often on coordination than on merits. The most common failure modes are: timing slippage between US-side filings and parallel proceedings in the off-ramp jurisdiction; inconsistent characterization of the underlying assets across filings; and forensic record drift when multiple firms are working from divergent versions of the same dataset. We treat these as the primary risks to manage and structure the engagement to minimize them from intake.

Engagement structure

  • Counsel is retained under written engagement directly with the claimant, after a written viability assessment. Counsel identity is disclosed to the claimant in the engagement letter at the time of signing, not in the pre-engagement phase.
  • The XELTRUS coordination role is documented in a separate written agreement, with fee structure disclosed in advance.
  • Where the matter involves a victim cohort, the cohort’s representation structure is established before counsel is engaged, so the chain of authority is unambiguous from the outset.