In what
not long ago was a male-dominated area of law, asset recovery, Courtney Pearce is demonstrating that tracing hidden assets and delivering justice is not a gender or age-specific art, it’s just a whole lot of hard work and Sherlock Holmes-like detective skills.
“You’re part lawyer, part detective,” said Pearce, the youngest partner in the country’s oldest law firm, Callenders & Co. “You have a client who has suspicions about what happened that caused what appeared to be a good plan, investment or partnership to go bad. You have a lot of paper and you have to follow the paper and follow the assets, building the case around what you skills helped you track down.
After you follow the evidence, you attack, finding the legal means of undoing what is sometimes a very clever scheme.”
Recently, Pearce was recognized for that combination of skills.
She was one of five attorneys in The Bahamas identified International Who’s Who of Business Lawyers as one of the world’s leading asset recovery lawyers. The accolade came as a result of the respected British-based publication’s independent research and strict vetting system, which included client and peer recommendations as well as court case reviews. Of the five Bahamian attorneys – less than one tenth of one percent of the attorneys in the country – Pearce was the youngest and one of only two women awarded the title.
“We are extremely proud of Courtney Pearce and pleased that she has been recognized internationally,” said the firm’s Managing Partner Colin Callender. “Courtney is not only a brilliant and incisive lawyer, she is one of the hardest working legal minds in the land today.”
For Pearce, recovering assets is like solving a riddle.
“It’s hard,” she acknowledges. “Most of the time you are dealing with international people who have made great efforts to hide or relocate assets. They have taken steps to avoid their assets being discovered. You wade through trust structures, go behind shell companies until you find the one thread that allows you to unravel everything. And with the high net worth individual, you are not only trying to trace the cash, you may be dealing with land, shares, ships, even planes.”
Pearce was one of three new partners named this year, bringing Callenders to a complement of seven partners in Nassau and Grand Bahama in the only firm in The Bahamas to have two Queen’s Counsel barristers, the highest ranking in the Commonwealth. In 2012, global authority Corp. INT’L, a network of leading law and financial services advisers and financiers, named Callenders & Co. The Bahamas’ best corporate law firm.
Corp. Int’l publishes a critical thinker newsletter that goes to 280,000 leading professionals around the world.
Diane Phillips and Associates
