Left to right: Richard A. Edlin is a Vice Chair of Greenberg Traurig and William J. Goines is the Greenberg Traurig Co-Managing Shareholder of the Silicon Valley Office

A team of high-profile litigators from Greenberg Traurig came out on top after a five-week jury trial, scoring a $32 million verdict in a dispute that stemmed from a brazen Ponzi scheme.

Firm vice chairman Richard Edlin, who also chairs the litigation practice in New York and the business and regulatory financial services litigation group, and William Goines, the co-managing shareholder of Greenberg Traurig's Silicon Valley office, led the team for KT Engcore, a subsidiary of KT Corp., the largest telecom company in South Korea.

They faced off in Alameda County Superior Court against lawyers from Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani representing Silicon Valley-based ASI Computer Technologies.

Once upon a time, the two companies—along with Moneual, Inc., an up-and-coming South Korean computer manufacturer—seemed to be happy business partners. According to court papers, Moneual and ASI engaged in $600 million of business together relating to the sale of home theater personal computers.

KT Eng was a sort of middleman, providing certain financing support and acting as Moneual's exporter. The company would buy the home theater units for $1,853 per unit and export them to ASI for $1,955 per unit.

“At the time KT Eng entered into its agreements with Moneual and ASI, it had good reason to consider both companies legitimate business partners,” the Greenberg Traurig team wrote. “Moneual had recently received the Microsoft Innovation Award for its [home theater personal computers] in 2007 and was praised in Bill Gates' keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that year.”

But it turns out, the home theater products didn't sell well and Moneual couldn't absorb the losses. It allegedly began shipping the units back to Korea under the guise that they were “components” for other computer products, then allegedly re-shipped them as worthless “shells” at the original price.

“Moneual and ASI induced KT Eng to export these worthless or non-existent products to ASI at vastly inflated prices so that Moneual could obtain Korean bank loans and factoring based on KT Eng's credit receivables,” the Greenberg Traurig lawyers wrote.

It all came crashing down when Korean law enforcers in 2014 got wise to the scam. Moneual's CEO was sentenced to 23 years in prison, the harshest sentence in Korean history for a financial crime (reduced on appeal to 15 years) and the company went bankrupt.

KT Eng was one of the casualties, left holding the bag on $32 million of purchase orders from ASI.

But KT Eng's case was a little messy, Edlin of Greenberg Traurig admits. That's because one of KT's employees was convicted of taking bribes from Moneual and sent to jail.

But Edlin and Goines argued KT Eng as a whole was in the dark. “All that was going on not with our knowledge, but behind our back,” Edlin said by phone from Korea. Moreover, the impact of the bribes was to reduce KT Eng's margins. “We were really a victim,” he said.

KT Eng wasn't the only one burned by the scheme. Four South Korean banks have sued ASI and computer parts and accessories retailer Newegg.com in federal court in Los Angeles, alleging hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud.

“We purposely kept our case in state court,” Edlin said. “We didn't want to get consolidated with the bank cases. We wanted to get in and done before those cases went to trial.”

The jury—nine women and three men—sided with KT Eng across the board. On Dec. 7, they awarded the full amount of damages sought: $31,415,055.