A creditor who waits for judgment before acting on interim relief and asset preservation often finds the debtor's accounts empty and the assets already sold. This page sets out how SOLUTIO assesses, structures and pursues freezing measures across borders, before the underlying claim is even filed, so the eventual judgment is not an empty piece of paper.
Most instructions arrive at the moment the debtor's conduct changes, not at the moment the invoice falls due. A director liability claim against the same individual, running in parallel, is often the signal that assets are being moved out of corporate reach: see director liability claims for how the two tracks interact.
Interim relief sits inside a wider recovery strategy, not apart from it. Where the file also calls for cross-border debt recovery, the two workstreams are planned together from the first assessment.
The sequence is short by design, because urgency is the point of the measure. At intake, the client decides whether the facts justify moving before the debtor is on notice, based on an early view built from a targeted asset tracing report where one does not already exist.
Clients frequently treat a granted freezing order as the end of the risk, as though the money were already theirs. In practice the order only preserves what exists at the moment it bites, and it must still be followed by a substantive claim that proves the debt and by an enforcement step that converts the preserved asset into payment.
SOLUTIO treats the interim measure as one stage in a sequence, not as the result itself. The assessment we give at the outset states what the measure can and cannot secure, so the client is not deciding on an incomplete picture.
The fee basis for an interim relief instruction is agreed before we act, and it is set out separately from any figure quoted elsewhere on this site. Court fees, any security or counter-undertaking a judge requires, and the fee of the local correspondent handling the filing are each identified and quoted on their own terms once the jurisdiction and the instrument are known. We do not bundle these costs into a single estimate before that point, because the amount a court demands as security varies with the measure requested and the asset targeted.
Within the European Union, an application can often proceed under Regulation (EU) 655/2014, which created a common European account preservation order procedure precisely for cross-border claims of this kind. Outside that framework, the route runs through the national law of the jurisdiction where the asset sits, and the measure is only as strong as the local court's willingness to grant it without notice.
Where an arbitration underlies the dispute, interim measures granted by the tribunal or by a supporting court sit alongside the framework the New York Convention 1958 provides for the eventual award, though the two instruments serve different stages of the same file. Once a measure has done its work, converting it into payment is a separate question, addressed under enforcement of foreign judgments. In every jurisdiction, the filing itself is handled by admitted lawyers and licensed providers in the jurisdiction concerned, coordinated from a single point of contact.
It is a provisional court order that freezes or preserves a specific asset, account or shipment before the underlying claim is decided. It protects the target of a future judgment; it does not itself establish or pay the debt.
Speed depends on the jurisdiction, the instrument used and how quickly the asset and its location can be identified with enough precision for a court to act. We assess this on the facts of each file rather than on a fixed timetable.
No. It preserves what is identified and reached at the time the order bites, and it must be maintained, complied with and eventually converted into enforcement. Assets not covered by the order remain exposed to being moved.
A creditor who files the substantive claim first and thinks about the debtor's assets afterward is often filing against a shell. The window in which a bank account, a vessel or a receivable can still be reached closes the moment the debtor learns that a claim is coming.