Winning on paper is nice—but it's not much use if your client can't collect.

That's where Kobre & Kim comes in.

Founded in 2003, the fast-growing AmLaw 200 firm is making a name as the go-to experts on judgment enforcement and offshore asset recovery—or for that matter, the opposite, depending on the client's needs.

Some of the firm's work sounds straight out of a James Bond movie—trying to collect a $130 million debt from an Eastern European billionaire with alleged ties to the Russian mafia, for example. Or conversely, trying to shield the former ruling family of an African country against attempted asset seizures of more than $1 billion by a consortium of governments in litigations across Europe.

“Kobre & Kim is one of few law firms in the world with a special focus on representing judgment creditors and debtors in complex, cross-border debt enforcement matters in the $100 million to $1billion-plus range,” said Kobre lawyer Chris Cogburn, who is based in New York previously practiced at O'Melveny & Myers and Jones Day.

The firm's latest fight is on behalf of three former executives and investors in Sky Solar Holdings Co. On Tuesday, Kobre lawyer John Han filed a petition in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to confirm a $13 million arbitration award entered last May by a tribunal with the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre.

Han wants the court in New York to convert the Hong Kong arbitration award against Sky Solar founder Su Weili, who allegedly stripped his company's assets in secret and transferred them to a holding company, which he then took public on the Nasdaq.

The New York action is fairly typical, said Han, who is based in Hong Kong and joined Kobre from Covington & Burling. “The New York Convention (which governs the enforcement of foreign arbitration awards) offers a very limited menu of defenses to confirmation, and none of them are available to these debtors,” he said via email. “With that said, Mr. Su's attitude toward this obligation has given us no reason to believe that he will honor it voluntarily even after a U.S. court recognizes it, so we don't expect the confirmation proceeding to be the end of the story.”

The suit comes on the heels of a series of wins last month by Kobre lawyers in enforcing a multimillion-dollar international arbitration award against Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting, who founded technology conglomerates Le.com and LeEco.

So how do the Kobre lawyers do it?

“Our team comprises more than a dozen former DOJ lawyers experienced in tracing and seizing assets of debtors who hide assets in the international black market,” Cogburn said in an email. “We also have English solicitors and barristers, many of whom are qualified and based in the major offshore jurisdictions (BVI, Cayman Islands), which are popular destinations for debtors hoping to place their assets beyond the reach of judgment or award creditors.”

Han added that they “usually employ a combination of judicially assisted discovery and other asset-tracing tools to form as complete a picture as possible of a creditor's assets around the globe, then deploy freezing injunctions and a variety of asset seizure measures to ensure our clients are made whole. Our strategies often use a combination of offshore and onshore actions.”

Han said the most likely scenario where someone refuses to accept liability and pay up is when “high-value judgments or awards are issued against debtors…including foreign countries, state-owned entities and high net worth individuals with assets in multiple jurisdictions,” he said. “These debtors are not shy about testing the endurance and resources of their creditors, and our monetization strategies are built to overcome that recalcitrance.”