Howard L. Vickery II

Partner
New York City

t: 212 446 2300
f: 212 446 2350

hvickery@bsfllp.com

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Area of Practice

Litigation

Education

University of Chicago Law School, J.D., 1975; Associate Editor, University of Chicago Law Review

University of California, Berkeley, M.A., Political Science, 1971

Swarthmore College, B.A., Social Sciences, 1970; Honors

Language Spoken

Portuguese

Admissions

New York, California, and District of Columbia

United States Supreme Court

United States Courts of Appeals: Second Circuit

United States District Courts: Southern and Eastern Districts of New York

Howard Vickery specializes in the area of complex commercial litigation with most of his work involving international disputes.

In his twenty-five years of practice, Mr. Vickery has acquired broad experience with conflict of laws, civil law legal systems, recognition of foreign judgments here and abroad, parallel judicial proceedings, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, transnational discovery, proof of foreign law, provisional remedies, long-arm jurisdiction, forum non conveniens, and cross-border litigation generally.

From December, 1999 to January, 2004, Mr. Vickery served as the lead counsel for Petroleo Brasileiro S.A. - Petrobras, the Brazilian national oil company, in an action against U.S. performance bond sureties and a consortium of Brazilian construction companies in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The case involved claims and counterclaims in excess of one billion dollars for cost overrun and delay damages arising from the conversion of two offshore oil production platforms in Brazil. Experts in the case compared the platforms to NASA space projects in terms of technological sophistication. In describing the discovery in the case as "massive," the Court noted that that the parties exchanged more than a million pages of documents and took 110 depositions. After a two month bench trial, the Court awarded Petrobras $370 million in damages. The Court observed that the case "required an understanding of complex issues of naval architecture, construction contracts, performance issues, financial and accounting issues, suretyship law, Brazilian corporate law, and many other issues." Moreover, "the case was exceedingly difficult and pursued with skill and efficiency" by the Petrobras legal team.

Mr. Vickery speaks Portuguese and is a director of the Portuguese Chamber of Commerce and the North American-Chilean Chamber of Commerce in New York.

From 1978 to 1981, Mr. Vickery was a defense analyst in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.

Mr. Vickery spoke on litigating international construction and performance bond disputes at the 2004 Offshore Technology Conference in Houston. He has written articles on drafting shipbuilding contracts, recovering assets from offshore asset protection trusts, money-laundering, international bank regulation, and judicial appeals of informal agency action.

Selected Professional Awards and Associations

American Bar Association
New York City Bar Association
Federal Bar Council

Selected Publications and Presentations

Drafting Construction Contracts to Avoid Disputes, Offshore Technology Conference (May 2004)

Judicial Review of Informal Agency Action, 28 Hastings Law Journal 307 (1976)

The Trustee as Target, Offshore Trust Conference (1977)