The world’s not like the United States, we have 50 states. Every state is required to enforce judgments from any other state. It’s because of the full faith in credit clause in the Constitution. There’s no such thing as a full faith in credit clause worldwide. Japan, England, France, Germany, China, Italy, are not required to enforce U.S. judgments.

Sometimes there’s treaties that make it a little bit easier, but in every single case there’s at least a mini trial. By the way, it’s not the same with arbitration awards. Martin Damke (american arbitration association), a good friend and mentor of mine, who’s now dead, founded the American Arbitration Association and he spent his whole life of forcing and massaging the international community in New York to adopt arbitration. Arbitration treaties make arbitration awards much easier to enforce internationally than regular judgments from litigation.

So I stay away from arbitration provisions if possible. You should too if you do business internationally.

In the United States, we can register judgments and enforce them easily with no major procedural impediments.

Not true when you take a judgment in the United States and go abroad to enforce it. By moving money abroad, or by moving assets abroad, the jurisdiction in the United States forces your opponent to hurdle some very significant barriers.

The first barrier is that they have to hire a lawyer; and in America, we’re used to lawyers being commodities. We’re burdened with 1,300,000 lawyers. Places like China have less than 200,000. We have a lot of “out of work”, unemployed lawyers willing to do anything for almost any compensation agreement.

If you go abroad, you’re going to find a much smaller number of lawyers. You’re going to find them to be much more ethical, and will find none of them are willing to do it on a contingent fee basis. Imagine a contingent fee litigator getting a judgment for $5,000,000 against you in the United States. He would be going home to count his money right now.

But can you imagine the same guy shelling out $250,000 to pay some lawyer in Switzerland in cash to go after your protected fund just because you moved it from Bank of America in California to Credit Suisse or Pictet Bank in Switzerland? No, they’re not going to do that. They’re going to really have a problem with pursuing you abroad. Why?

Because they’re like common burglars and they only take the easy pickings. They want what they can get their hands on without too much work. They’re not going to spend their own money. The first hurdle is they have to hire a international lawyer, which gets extremely expensive.

Second, in most countries, they’ll have to post a bond to pay your legal fees if you win. This isn’t some little $5,000-bond. This is a quarter of a million $ type of bond.

Oftentimes, a full cash bond so the money is there unless they can get an insurance company that will write a check. Unless they can get that type of insurance company to issue a bond, they will have to post the bond with cash.

So, you’re opponents will have to put up double what they would normally have to spend to go after the money abroad. The real problem for your opponents is the funds can easily move places again. What does it take you to move money? It takes you 5, 10, 15 minutes to authorize a transfer. Your opponent won’t even know the money has moved. But your opponent will have to spend at least six months litigating.