Begin Your Tariff Refund Claim

What Happens When You Submit

1. Confidential intake. You complete a short form on Commerce Justice Alliance. It asks for importer-of-record name, approximate entry volume between February 2025 and February 2026, primary sector, and contact information. No documents are required to start.
2. Eligibility screen. Your submission is reviewed against the four criteria that govern every tariff refund claim: importer-of-record status, entry dates inside the IEEPA window, duty actually paid on the entries in question, and no liquidation more than 180 days in the past without a filed protest.
3. Attorney match. Qualifying claims are routed to CIT-admitted counsel who have self-identified capacity in your sector. Matching considers duty volume, complexity, jurisdictional posture, and fee structure fit. You are under no obligation to retain the matched firm.
4. Direct attorney contact. Counsel reaches out within two business days in most cases. The initial call is a scoping conversation. No engagement letter is signed until you have reviewed the fee terms and confirmed the conflict check.
5. Your choice. You may retain the matched firm, request a different match, or take your claim elsewhere. Commerce Justice Alliance does not collect fees from importers. The platform is paid by participating law firms on a subscription basis.

A Pre-Intake Eligibility Check

Before you submit, the four questions below will tell you, in under a minute, whether your company has a viable tariff refund claim. If you answer yes to all four, you are almost certainly eligible to file.

• Were you the importer of record on one or more U.S. Customs entries between February 2025 and February 2026? The importer of record is the party on record with CBP, not necessarily the party that physically received or paid for the goods.
• Did you pay IEEPA-based tariffs on those entries? This means the reciprocal tariffs, fentanyl tariffs, or the across-the-board duties that were imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Section 232 and Section 301 duties are separate regimes with their own procedural rules.
• Are your entries either unliquidated, or liquidated within the last 180 days? Liquidation is the final assessment step on a CBP entry. Once an entry is liquidated and the 180-day protest window under 19 USC 1514 closes, the entry is administratively final. Entries that liquidated more than 180 days ago are not necessarily lost, but they require a more complex procedural posture.
• Can you reasonably estimate your duty exposure at $10,000 or more? Smaller claims remain viable, particularly where consolidated with similarly situated importers, but the economics of retaining individual counsel generally favor claims at or above this threshold. Commerce Justice Alliance screens for both tiers.

What You Will Need Later (But Not Today)

The intake form itself requires none of the documents below. However, if your claim advances to an engagement, counsel will request them early. Gathering these in parallel with your intake will shorten the retention timeline by weeks.

• Customs entry summaries (CBP Form 7501) for the period in question. Your customs broker maintains these. A bulk export is preferable to page-by-page retrieval.
• ACE portal access credentials or a written statement identifying your broker-of-record. The CBP Phase 1 refund portal operates through ACE, and attorney access is enabled by importer authorization.
• A duty-paid summary showing total IEEPA duties paid by entry date, HTS classification, and country of origin. Most brokers can produce this on request within forty-eight hours.
• Corporate authorization documentation — typically a board resolution or officer certificate — confirming authority to engage counsel and file claims on behalf of the importer of record.
• A current list of pending and closed CBP protests, if any. Protests already filed do not bar refund claims; they may accelerate them.

Why Commerce Justice Alliance

Tariff refund claims move through two distinct tracks: the administrative track at CBP, which covers the cleanest sixty-three percent of entries, and the litigation track at the Court of International Trade, which handles everything that the administrative track cannot. A single importer often needs counsel capable of both. The law firm market is fragmented, however. Customs boutiques tend to be strong administratively and thin on CIT litigation capacity. AmLaw 100 international trade groups have the litigation bench but price themselves out of routine protest work. Plaintiff-side firms are rapidly building tariff refund practices but often lack CIT bar admissions.

Commerce Justice Alliance was built to map importer demand against this fragmented supply. The platform is a marketplace, not a law firm. It does not practice law. It does not hold client funds. It routes qualified importer intake to counsel who have self-identified their sector capacity, fee structure, and jurisdictional admissions, and it lets importers compare without paying a referral premium.

Fees, Plainly Stated

The intake form is free. The eligibility screen is free. The attorney match is free. Commerce Justice Alliance collects no fee from importers at any stage. Participating law firms pay a monthly subscription to maintain active listings on the platform. When counsel is retained, the fee structure — whether flat, hourly, contingency, or hybrid — is negotiated directly between the importer and the firm. Commerce Justice Alliance receives no portion of any legal fee.

Confidentiality and Conflict Checks

Every intake is screened against the participating firm roster before any match is made. If your proposed counsel is adverse to your company in unrelated matters, or represents a party with interests materially adverse to yours in the tariff refund docket, the system routes to the next qualified match. Your submitted information is encrypted in transit and at rest, and is shared with matched counsel only after the conflict check clears.

Frequently Asked Questions