Current legal questions
Short practical notes published approximately ten times a year. Not a news feed — only subjects currently requiring attention in the files.
AI tools produce text faster than any lawyer can. They also produce errors — confidently presented, structurally plausible, and occasionally invisible until the wrong moment. The professional duty to verify, judge and accept responsibility for what is submitted to a court or delivered to a client does not diminish because a machine drafted the first version.
The practical question is not whether to use AI but where verification discipline must be sharpest. In legal research, in citation, in translation of nuanced legal concepts between languages — these are the areas where the cost of an undetected error is highest. Speed is not a defence.
A dispute that appeared finished returns to court. The parties reached terms, signed, and one of them did not perform. The questions that follow are not straightforward: what exactly was agreed, what constitutes breach, what remedies are available, and whether re-opening the litigation is the right response or whether a further negotiated resolution is achievable.
Settlement agreements are enforceable as contracts and, if filed with the court, as judgments. The terms matter — both what was written and, increasingly, what was not. Enforcement proceedings can be faster than new litigation, but only if the agreement was properly drafted in the first place.
A creditor with a judgment from a foreign court needs to enforce it against assets in Israel. Israeli law provides a recognition and enforcement procedure, but the conditions are specific: the foreign court must have had jurisdiction by Israeli standards, the judgment must be final and enforceable in its home jurisdiction, and certain procedural requirements must be met before an Israeli court will treat the foreign judgment as its own.
The process is not automatic. Getting the documents right, filing in the correct court, and anticipating the debtor's likely objections are the practical challenges. Timing matters — assets can move.
When a company's financial position deteriorates, the duties of directors shift. The interests of creditors become directly relevant — not only those of shareholders. Decisions taken in the period before formal insolvency proceedings are examined in hindsight: what did the directors know, when did they know it, and what did they do.
Directors who continue trading when insolvency is foreseeable, or who prefer some creditors over others without proper justification, face personal liability. The point at which this exposure begins is not always obvious from inside the business. Early legal advice on the position — before the filing — is consistently more useful than advice sought after the proceedings have opened.
A freezing order or an attachment obtained before judgment has one purpose: to ensure that if the claimant wins, there is something to enforce against. The debtor who knows litigation is coming may move assets. The creditor who waits for a final judgment before acting may find that the judgment is worth less than the paper it is written on.
Israeli courts grant interim relief on application, without advance notice to the other side in appropriate cases. The threshold — real risk of dissipation, prima facie case, balance of convenience — is not mechanical. The preparation of the application, the evidence filed in support and the arguments made at the hearing determine whether relief is granted and in what form.
Key evidence in commercial disputes increasingly exists only in electronic form — emails, messages, financial records, metadata. The procedural questions that follow are not always straightforward: disclosure obligations, authenticity challenges, chain of custody, and the admissibility of records extracted from systems the other side controls.
Digital evidence that is handled incorrectly — collected without proper process, altered inadvertently, or produced in a format the court cannot use — can undermine a strong case. Early attention to how evidence is preserved and produced is as important as the legal arguments that will be built on it.
A creditor based abroad learns that an Israeli debtor has entered insolvency proceedings. The window for filing a claim is not indefinite, and the Israeli process — the court, the trustee, the claim form, the language — is unfamiliar. Missing the filing deadline, or filing incorrectly, can mean losing a legitimate claim entirely.
Foreign creditors need local representation that can act quickly, file correctly and report back clearly. The claim must be documented in accordance with Israeli requirements, which may differ from what the creditor's home jurisdiction would expect. Speed and accuracy at this stage determine whether the foreign creditor participates in the distribution at all.
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