Jorge Mestre

Jorge A. Mestre engages exclusively in a commercial-litigation practice and is Board Certified in International Litigation and Arbitration by the Florida Bar. He is also a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (FCIArb). In Chambers USA, where he is one of only six lawyers in Band One Litigation (Florida), he has been praised for “his strategic sense and creative thinking in critical litigation matters” and characterized as “a brilliant litigator with the creative edge; he sees a tactical advantage in what seems like an intractable problem.” 

Among his many high-stakes matters, Mestre represented Mario Echevarria, one of the heirs of a Cuban family that owned Cayo Coco (a small key off the northern coast of central Cuba) against Expedia Group, Inc., and its affiliates under the 1996 Helms-Burton Act. After six years of litigation, in a historic, first-of-its-kind legal victory, a federal jury in the Southern District of Florida awarded $29.8 million in damages (which included treble damages under the statute) against each of four Expedia corporate defendants to the plaintiff in the first-ever jury trial under the Helms-Burton Act for a total verdict of $119 million. The verdict against Expedia marks a sweeping win for the plaintiffs, who brought claims under Title III of the Act, which allows Cuban-Americans to seek recovery from entities that traffic in property confiscated by the communist Castro dictatorship.