wrongdoers and the misappropriated crypto or assets obtained utilising those proceeds. Again, we are seeing a real upturn in these types of instructions. Finally, over the last 15 years or so, we have been instructed on countless misappropriation of confidential information cases, which remain a central pillar of our offering. Again, in these we use our injunctive expertise and in particular search orders and freezing injunctions to secure the misappropriated information and, invariably, the evidence of wrongdoing. The most recent and high-profile example of one of these cases is the widely reported Ocado Group Plc v Project Today Holdings Limited & Others. In all of the above categories of work, we are also doing work on behalf of defendants. To what jurisdictions does the work take you, and how does the department undertake cross-border work? Mishcon is predominantly a Londonbased law firm with offices in Hong Kong and Singapore. The vast majority of the matters on which we are instructed, however, have a multijurisdictional element. From the description of our work above, this is somewhat inevitable. We routinely act on matters involving common law jurisdiction such as Cayman, BVI, Hong Kong, Cyprus and Singapore, among others. In terms of non-common law judications that often feature in our cases, our clients’ cases regularly have a footprint in the United States, Switzerland and Luxembourg – again, among others. To operate and project manage these types of multijurisdictional cases, we have the benefit of the International Fraud Group (IFG), which our department set up approximately 25 years ago and now has 43 firms worldwide. These firms are all experts in the fraud injunctive and asset tracing space in each of those jurisdictions and allow us to operate at the highest level in pursuing these matters. I should note that we do not only use IFG members, but it does form the backbone of our international fraud litigation operation. What are the benefits for clients in obtaining these injunctions? In terms of worldwide freezing injunctions (and the vast majority of the freezers we obtain are worldwide freezers due to the nature of the disputes), the two most obvious things they provide are, firstly, the freezing of a respondent’s assets – generally up to an amount or above the amount claimed. While they are called worldwide freezing injunctions, in fact they only freeze up to that amount or have effect up to that amount in the jurisdiction in which they are ordered. It is therefore necessary to obtain further supporting freezing injunctions in the other jurisdictions in which the respondent’s assets are identified. In those circumstances we routinely obtain, for example, four, five or six freezing injunctions in other jurisdictions in support of the base worldwide freezing injunction. These are then generally served simultaneously on the respondents in order to lock down the target assets globally as tightly as possible. The second benefit is worldwide asset disclosure. That provision of the Order, as opposed to the freezing provisions, is not dependent on the jurisdiction in which the Order is actually made. In other words, it does not matter if the worldwide freezing order is made in, for example, England or the Cayman Islands; the worldwide asset disclosure order is exactly that and the respondent has to disclose its assets worldwide. 46 LAWYERMONTHLYDECEMBER 2022 Mishcon is predominantly a Londonbased law firm with offices in Hong Kong and Singapore. The vast majority of the matters on which we are instructed, however, have a multijurisdictional element.
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