A client arrives certain they want to sue: the counterparty owes money, the contract is on their side, the wrong is obvious. A lawyer would nod, except for one question nobody can answer in that conversation — what exactly would you collect from, if you won. A pre-litigation memo answers that before anyone has spent a first day or a first filing fee.
Winning a case and getting paid are two different events, sometimes separated by years. A claim that looks unbeatable on paper turns easily into a judgment with nowhere to present it: the debtor's accounts are empty, the property is signed over, and they are already a party to a dozen similar proceedings where the queue of creditors is longer than the list of assets. A lawyer who enters such a case blind risks months of work. A creditor who agrees to litigate without an assessment risks the filing fee and the time. Both are saved by the same thing — a decision to take the case or not, made on facts rather than on the client's sense of grievance.
Nobody feels this more sharply than a practitioner on a success fee. The model is simple: they invest their time now and are paid a percentage of what is recovered later. If nothing is recovered, they worked for free — not because they lost, but because they won into a void. Months of preparation, hearings, appeal, and at the end a judgment worth nothing because the debtor is at zero.
So an experienced lawyer on a contingency asks the questions before taking the case: how solid is the evidence, will the client's position survive a counterattack, and above all, is there anything to take. The problem is that those answers are not in the client's file. The client knows their own version. They do not know that the debtor's property is already pledged, that three enforcement proceedings are running in parallel, that the registered address is an empty flat, and that the real assets were signed over to a connected person long ago. Those facts exist in open sources, but assembling them under deadline — while the client pushes to file now — is not something a lawyer has the hours for. This is where analysis goes in front of the lawyer, not instead of them.
The first thing the assessment does is put two evidence bases side by side. Yours and the defendant's. Not in the abstract — "we have a strong position" — but concretely: which facts you can support with a document and which rest on assertion; what survives objection in a hearing and what collapses; which counterargument the defendant will almost certainly raise, and whether you have anything to answer it with.
The second is recoverability. This is the heart of the assessment. Does the debtor hold real estate, vehicles, corporate stakes, account balances; was property transferred shortly before the dispute; are other proceedings already running that would put you in a queue behind someone else's claims. Winning against a company with assets is one thing; winning against a shell stripped of everything but its seal is another.
The third is who stands on the other side. A defendant's litigation history reveals them as a player: do they litigate rarely and lose, or are they a serial defendant who knows the process better than your client and drags cases out until the claimant tires. That changes both tactics and the question of whether to enter at all.
And the fourth is two separate estimates that are routinely conflated. The chance of winning on the merits, and the chance of actually being paid after winning. These are different numbers. Cases with a high chance of winning and a near-zero chance of collecting are the dangerous ones, because they look attractive right up until you look at the debtor's assets. The memo separates the two so that the decision rests on the second, not only the first.
For a Ukrainian defendant, three access facts shape what the memo can establish. The Unified State Register reopened as open data on 19 January 2026, with beneficial ownership — so corporate stakes and control chains are documentable. Property for legal entities is still fully available, though since 27 December 2025 the exact address and cadastral number appear only in paper extracts or on an enforcement officer's or attorney's request, not in electronic ones. Vehicle records have been closed to third parties since 24 February 2022.
Two registers matter more than they sound. Court records are open, which is what makes an opponent profile possible at all. And enforcement proceedings are public — so before you file, you can see how many creditors are already in line ahead of you, which is often the single fact that settles whether the claim is worth bringing.
Three situations, in order of how much the memo tends to save.
The practitioner on a success fee, deciding whether to take the case. The memo turns a gut call into a documented one, and the cost of being wrong is months of unpaid work rather than a few hundred dollars.
In-house counsel preparing to file, who has to justify the budget internally. "We assessed recoverability and it is there" is a different conversation with a CFO than "we believe we will win".
The creditor considering assignment of the claim. If a debt is being sold or bought, its price depends less on the paper amount than on what stands behind the debtor. A memo prices that.
The memo does not predict a verdict, and any analyst promising a percentage chance of winning is selling confidence rather than analysis. Courts weigh evidence; we establish what evidence exists and what condition it is in. It does not qualify your claim legally — that is your counsel's work, and the memo is built to be handed to them. And it cannot see what open sources do not hold: bank balances, undisclosed contracts, private arrangements. Where the answer is not available, the memo says so, rather than filling the gap with an inference.
One PDF of 8 to 15 pages, delivered in 24 to 72 hours. It opens with the recommendation — proceed, proceed with conditions, or do not file — and then shows the working: evidence on both sides, an asset and recoverability picture, the opponent profile, and the alternatives to litigation where they are cheaper, from a demand letter to assignment of the claim.
Pricing starts at $200 and is set by complexity: one Ukrainian defendant is not the same job as a chain running through three jurisdictions. The figure is quoted after the brief and does not move afterwards. There are no upsells inside the memo — it either says the case is worth taking or it says it is not, and the second answer is the one that saves the most money.
Related reading: what happens after a judgment, in winning the case is half of it, and the register-by-register method, in asset tracing in Ukraine.
Evidence against evidence, recoverability, opponent profile and the alternatives to litigation — one PDF in 24 to 72 hours that ends with a recommendation to file or not.