[5] Bolstering the firm's reputation in international law, President Eisenhower tapped partner Fredrick McCurdy Eaton to be the United States' lead negotiator at the 1960 Nuclear Ten Nation Committee on Disarmament,[6] in Geneva.

In postwar Germany, Shearman & Sterling helped German companies such as Siemens and BASF restructure their debts and re-emerge as credible exporters to the United States.

[10] During the 1980s, firm attorneys helped restructure the debts of many Latin American nations in the Brady transactions, and also won mandates in the privatization of numerous state-owned entities.

[11] In East Asia, Shearman & Sterling was one of the first firms to grasp the future strategic importance of the Asia-Pacific region, establishing offices in Hong Kong in 1978, followed by Tokyo, Beijing, Singapore and Shanghai.

[16]Among Shearman & Sterling's East Asian clients is the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MDB, which (under the control of Jho Low) had wired $368 million from a Swiss bank to the firm's trust account to pay for, among other things, a Beverly Hills hotel, private plane and yacht rentals, and the production of the film The Wolf of Wall Street.

Shearman & Sterling was named in a series of civil complaints filed by the DOJ "for having provided a trust account through which hundreds of millions of dollars belonging to Malaysia’s 1MDB fund were illicitly siphoned.