The average New York City obstetrician has endured eight lawsuits, according to Robert Lambert, a consultant with Asset Protection. Lambert’s job is to help these doctors, and others who may be subject to frivolous lawsuits or other claims, protect their wealth. “We have a whole industry in America of lawyers looking to rip people off, and as the government and the court system are not going to take care of you, my clients take the matter into their own hands,” the New York-based advisor explains. “They say, ‘I’m not going to be vulnerable to anyone at any time, ever again.’ ”
 Achieving invulnerability here in the world’s most litigious country is no easy task. However, individuals who move their assets overseas can significantly reduce their exposure. The simple offshore bank account is perhaps the most well-known tool for doing this, but there are other effective strategies, suitable for a range of objectives and circumstances. These include establishing offshore trusts, setting up a company abroad or obtaining insurance from
a foreign company. While these approaches no longer provide the level of safety and anonymity they did as recently as 15 years ago, they can still make it much more difficult, and expensive, for our legal adversaries to obtain the type of financial information they need to press their claims.
By domiciling assets in foreign locales, far from attorneys and their investigators, individuals can lower their risk of a lawsuit, according to Michael Chatzky, an attorney in La Jolla, Calif., who specializes in international wealth protection. Certain offshore strategies, he explains, “move the assets off the radar screen, so a private investigator trying to find out what kind of assets I have would not come across them, unless he finds a financial statement somewhere.”
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