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 MARKET VIEW – ARBITRATION 

James Hope of Vinge talks to Annette Magnusson, secretary general at the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce, about arbitrator diversity, emergency relief and sharing best institutional practices

That Sweden boasts both one of the earliest modern arbitration statutes – predating by two years the English Act of 1889 – and an enviable reputation for resolving East-West disputes as a legacy of its being the venue of choice for Cold War-era parties counts for little in the hyper-competitive world of international arbitration. Indeed, a few essentially superficial differences aside, Annette Magnusson admits that the alphabet soup of institutional rules can be largely indistinguishable. For parties, the question is always a simple one: what do I get in practice? The difference is not what an institution offers, but the way it puts its rules into practice. It is, says Magnusson, who joined the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce (SCC) in April 2010 from Swedish disputes firm Mannheimer Swartling, the ‘how’ that matters.