Robert Allen Law
Robert Allen Law is best known for its experienced team of attorneys who counsel and guide clients through the legal challenges and complexities of yachting and super yacht matters, including construction, buying, selling, chartering, financing, the brokerage business, and related litigation and arbitration.
Intensely focused on the yacht industry, the firm is a highly respected player in the industry and a reference to its peers. Serving as a legal advisor to several of the world’s leading yacht manufacturing groups and brokerages, it is also the principal legal advisor to the leading trade industry association for yacht brokers throughout the world.
The Robert Allen Law team brings together lawyers with diverse legal backgrounds and language capabilities. Its transaction lawyers, trained primarily in the corporate world, and its litigators, trained in the civil and criminal law fields, bring their experience to yacht transactions and the yacht business itself – supported by a senior lawyer who is also a professor of maritime and admiralty law. As a result, they are uniquely equipped to assist clients in the ever-increasingly global market of the yachting industry. In practical terms, their lawyers combined experience in the yacht field exceeds a century and its lawyers and staff are fluent in English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian.
Distinct from most “yacht law” firms, several Robert Allen Law attorneys worked in leading corporate and international law firms specializing in mergers and acquisitions, banking and finance and other business matters, making Robert Allen Law perhaps the leading corporate law firm in the world with a focus on the yachting industry. Because of these backgrounds and broad ranges of experience, the firm is also regularly engaged on behalf of lenders with respect to yacht financing transactions, as well as yacht builders – for buyers and manufactures – doing business internationally, wherever yachts are built and wherever buyers, sellers and banks are located.
In addition to its yacht transaction team, the firm’s litigation practice is well established and unique among law firms focused on the yacht field in the United States. When disputes arise, the firm’s experience in mediation, arbitration, and pre-trial matters, allows Robert Allen Law attorneys (including a former yacht captain) to assist clients with assessment of risks, as well as alternative, and often more efficient ways to resolve matters. When litigation is required, the firm also offers unique value in terms of trial experience because its team consists of industry veterans, including the current chairman of a Marine Arbitration Council, and attorneys who prosecuted for the State of Florida or defended those prosecuted.
