Huge plaintiff awards are usually associated with jury verdicts in Texas. But sometimes they can come without one, as Houston litigator Karl Stern can attest after he recently convinced an arbitration panel to award $622 million against Brazil state-owned oil company Petrobras for breaking a contract with his client.

Stern, a partner in the Houston office of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan who co-heads his firm’s energy practice, represents Vantage Deepwater—a Houston-based drilling company that entered into an eight-year agreement with Petrobras to operate a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico in 2009.