There is a fundamental difference between advising on risk and capitalizing on it. The legal market is saturated with practitioners who can navigate the labyrinth of existing OFAC regulations – a complex but ultimately defined task. The high-value practice is built by architects who see the fractures in the geopolitical landscape not as risks to be managed, but as voids where entire new markets will be born. The core legal question is not “is this sanctioned?” but “what is the legal framework for the day after it isn’t?”
This is the foundational principle of a high-value, global practice: find the gap between geopolitical stasis and commercial ambition. It is in this void – where the jurisdictions of international trade bodies, national security agencies, and sovereign property laws become a blurry, overlapping map – that premium legal work is forged. This isn’t about compliance with the world as it is; it’s about architecting the commercial and legal pathways for the world that is about to be.
Enter the 2014 Cuba détente. The fact that the subsequent Trump administration aggressively refroze the thaw is immaterial; the brief opening remains the perfect case study for this “geopolitical gap” thesis. For a fleeting moment, a seismic event cracked open a dormant market, and the core legal work wasn’t updating compliance manuals; it was architecting the foundational scaffolding for an entire economy against a backdrop of profound political risk. For finance lawyers, it was structuring joint ventures that anticipated the exact kind of political reversal that occurred. For real estate counsel, it was navigating the minefield of 60-year-old expropriation claims to unlock beachfront for hotel development, knowing the window could slam shut. For construction practices, it was negotiating the agreements to build the first modern resorts – all while pricing in the existential risk of a policy shift. The reversal doesn’t invalidate the example; it proves the thesis. The highest value lies in structuring opportunity in the face of maximum uncertainty.
But this pattern is not unique to Cuba. It is a recurring cycle. We saw it with:
The fall of the Soviet Union: The gold rush for lawyers in the 1990s was not in interpreting existing commercial codes, but in the fundamental battle to define private property. The lucrative work was in architecting the privatization of massive state-owned oil and gas assets, creating the legal structures for foreign investment where none had existed.
China’s entry into the WTO: The high-value work was not in tariff analysis, but in crafting the complex joint venture that allowed Western capital to flow into a restricted communist economy.
The next frontiers are already visible. Watch the international pages, not the legal journals. A potential nuclear deal with Iran would instantly unlock a sophisticated market of 80 million people, creating a Cuban-style void on a massive scale. The legal work will be in navigating sanctions snapback provisions, repatriating frozen assets, and untangling decades of commercial claims. The melting of the Arctic is creating new shipping lanes in a legal vacuum, raising novel questions of sovereignty, environmental liability, and maritime law that the existing frameworks are unequipped to handle. The global scramble for critical minerals to power the energy transition is forcing Western companies into unstable jurisdictions, where the most valuable lawyer is not the one who knows contract law, but the one who can architect a deal that survives a coup.
The conflation of an “international law” practice with a “geopolitical gap” practice is a dangerous oversimplification. The former helps a client operate within the world’s existing borders and rules. The latter helps a client build a business model for when those borders and rules are fundamentally redrawn. The political event is just the catalyst; the jurisdictional ambiguity is the product.