Nine institutions have not offered global settlements, Mr. Cremades said, though talks are continuing with some firms. He identified them as Credit Suisse, Vontobel, Mirabaud, Julius Baer, EFG and BBVA Switzerland, all based in Switzerland, as well as Banco Espirito Santo of Portugal, the Dutch bank ABN Amro and Barclays Spain.

Image Javier Cremades, center, helped an alliance of law firms win the settlement from banks for 720,000 victims of Madoff’s fraud. Credit... Susana Vera/Reuters

Efforts to reach the banks on Friday and Monday were mostly unsuccessful. Some stressed that they were not facing litigation. Rebeca Garcia, a spokeswoman for Credit Suisse, said, “We are in any case very confident that if any claim was brought forward by a client, we will defend ourselves vigorously.”

Mr. Cremades said that the 60 law firms, in 25 countries and employing 5,000 lawyers, had received a combined $65 million in fees from settlements so far.

The Madoff fraud totaled $64.8 billion in paper losses, and the alliance estimates that it affected a record three million investors, although there were slightly more than 4,900 active direct accounts shown in the Madoff records available to investigators. Mr. Madoff was sentenced last June to 150 years in prison.

In his most recent update, the Madoff trustee said he had recovered $1.5 billion that can be used to compensate 2,085 verified claims by American investors totalling $5.45 billion.

North Americans invested mainly through money managers, feeder funds and other hedge funds, while outside the United States, the common intermediaries were banks, using their networks in countries like Spain to offer Madoff-linked products to retail customers.

So far, settlements have been less common in the American courts because both the indirect feeder fund investors and the conduits they invested through have some incentive to stall.