Less than a nanosecond.

That's how long Shearman & Sterling partner Henry Weisburg said it took him to say yes to working pro bono on behalf of Cathleen Colvin, whose sister Marie Colvin, a war correspondent for the U.K.'s The Sunday Times, was killed in 2012 while reporting in Syria.

That Cat Colvin sought out the renowned international litigator (The American Lawyer named Weisburg Global Lawyer of the Year in 2012) makes eminent sense: The two worked together when she was an associate at Shearman & Sterling almost 20 years ago, and Colvin is now general counsel of the Pall Corp., a firm client. 

Last week, Weisburg led a Shearman team working with co-counsel Scott Gilmore and the Center for Justice & Accountability in securing a $302 million default judgment against the Syrian government. It's the first successful prosecution of the Assad regime for crimes against an American citizen under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, according to the firm.

Marie Colvin “was specifically targeted because of her profession, for the purpose of silencing those reporting on the growing opposition movement in the country,” wrote U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the District of Columbia in awarding $300 million in punitive damages—twice the usual award for such an extrajudicial killing.

“A targeted murder of an American citizen, whose courageous work was not only important, but vital to our understanding of warzones and of wars generally, is outrageous, and therefore a punitive damages award that multiplies the impact on the responsible state is warranted,” Jackson wrote. “This is particularly true given that Syria itself carried out the attack—it did not fund a third-party terrorist organization to do so.”

Henry Weisburg of Shearman & Sterling

While the Syrian government declined to participate the proceedings, the award is not merely symbolic. Weisburg said they have every intention attempting to collect on behalf of Cat Colvin and her three children, who are beneficiaries of Marie's estate.

He anticipates two tracks, he said in an interview. They'll look for Syrian assets in the United States—for example, Syria is a member of the United Nations, with a permanent UN mission in New York. “There will be a bank account associated with that,” Weisburg said (though he acknowledged the country was likely to claim sovereign immunity). “We'll also take the judgment to other jurisdictions,” he said. “I'm optimistic we'll learn there are a lot of Syrian off-shore assets.”

The plaintiff's lawyers presented a devastatingly thorough case to Jackson, with more than 1,000 pages of exhibits, declarations and expert reports.

“We wanted to file an extraordinarily comprehensive record so there would be no debate on the side of the facts,” Weisburg said.

Syrian government defectors and other eyewitnesses laid out the events of February 22, 2012, when Marie Colvin was murdered in the besieged city of Homs.

Hailed by many as the greatest war correspondent of her generation, Colvin had arrived in Syria the week before, traveling to Homs through a smuggler's route. Once in the city, she and photographer Paul Conroy used an underground water tunnel to reach a makeshift media center in an apartment building that offered foreign journalists a place to sleep and report.

The building came under fire after Syrian government forces intercepted the reporters' satellite phone signals. Colvin and French photographer Rémi Ochlik were killed by a rocket blast.

Weisburg and his team offered extensive proof that this was a deliberate attack on foreign journalists. “One surprising thing about autocracies is that they keep a lot of records…and a lot of those records have gotten out” of Syria, he said.

The plaintiff's lawyers were also fastidious in making sure the Arab nation was given proper notice of the suit.

It's a slow, complicated process. First, the legal papers had to be translated into Arabic, then given to the U.S. State Department, Weisburg said. Because the U.S. does not have diplomatic relations with Syria, the Czech Republic is the designated go-between. So the State Department sent the documents to its embassy in Prague, which gave them to the Czech foreign ministry, which sent them to its embassy in Damascus, which served them on the Syrian government.

Shortly after the case was filed, Weisburg said Syrian president Bashar Hafez al-Assad mentioned the lawsuit during a press conference—confirmation that he was indeed aware of the proceedings.

While building the evidentiary record was “a ton of work,” Weisburg said the team was “very pleased…with the depth of [Judge Jackson's] opinion.”