Prominent Wall Street firm Davis Polk has sued its former energy client Enel North America and two affiliates to recover $3.3 million in fees it alleges it's owed for its work on a $200 million contract dispute that was triggered by a catastrophic winter storm in 2021.
In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in New York state court, Davis Polk said it was tapped by Enel to represent its subsidiary High Lonesome Wind Power in a dispute with Allianz, a financial services company.
High Lonesome and an Allianz affiliate had entered into a derivative contract designed to hedge weather risk at the company's West Texas wind farm. After Winter Storm Uri knocked out power to millions of people living in Texas in February 2021, calculations under the agreement indicated High Lonesome owed Allianz more than $125 million, according to Davis Polk.
Allianz sued Enel's High Lonesome in 2022. Davis Polk said Enel, whose parent company is Rome-based Enel S.p.A. (ENEI.MI), stopped paying its legal bills in late 2024. By June 2025, the company had racked up millions in unpaid legal fees for more than 2,000 hours of work by Davis Polk attorneys in the case, according to the fee complaint.
"Davis Polk brings this action reluctantly, after months of good-faith efforts to resolve the matter directly, and only because Defendants left no other avenue for recovering fees for work they do not dispute was performed," the firm said in the lawsuit.
A spokesperson for Enel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Davis Polk in a statement called the lawsuit "a straightforward case over Enel’s failure to fulfill a contractual obligation" and said the firm "achieved strong results at every stage" of the Allianz dispute.
The firm in its lawsuit said it is seeking the $3.3 million in fees as well as "pre-judgment and post-judgment interest accruing from the date of each invoice."
Court records show that the underlying dispute between High Lonesome and Allianz Risk Transfer (Bermuda) Limited is still ongoing in Manhattan federal court.
After a federal judge allowed Davis Polk to withdraw from the case in September 2025, High Lonesome retained law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Lawyers at the firm representing High Lonesome did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
