In its latest annual report, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has reported that its disputes unit has ‘faced difficulties in retaining staff’, causing delays to panels being established amid a surging caseload.
Continue reading “WTO failing to cope with trade disputes burden as staff exits mount”
TLT has been gifted with a key mandate to defend a group of 26 former Halliwells partners in a dispute with the firm’s liquidator, as well as the appeal of a further case involving nine other former partners, after Irwin Mitchell was dropped from both cases.
Continue reading “Winning work: TLT picks up Halliwells dispute as Irwin Mitchell loses out”
Gentium Law’s Matthew Parish discusses a quiet revolution.
Switzerland is distinctive as a centre of international arbitration. It packs a punch well above its size. Although statistics about arbitration are by their nature confidential, anecdotal evidence indicates the diminutive country of a mere 7.5 million people is host to several hundreds of arbitrations per year. This is a remarkable figure.
The London Court of International Arbitration has perhaps only 150 cases per annum, while the International Chamber of Commerce hosts roughly double that number. In petite Geneva – a mere 185,000 people – arbitration lawyers may be the largest group of legal specialists in the city. Continue reading “The new Swiss perspective on international arbitration”
With the government’s current proposal to raise the fee to issue proceedings to 5% of the value for claims worth £10,000 or more, research recently undertaken by the Ministry of Justice shows that 61% of respondents believe the proposals will have a negative impact on the UK’s competitiveness in commercial disputes, according to RPC.
Traditionally dominated by US lawyers, French and British arbitrators trumped their North American rivals last year by securing more arbitral appointments at the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).
Tom Moore assesses the impact of the new London arbitration rulebook
The battle lines between arbitration lawyers and litigators have long been drawn along arguments of efficiency and cost. The urban myth, somewhat manufactured by arbitration practitioners themselves, that arbitration is more expedient and less costly than its cousin in the courts has long been dismissed, while increasingly the London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA) is not only competing with courts for big-ticket cases, but other institutions around the world.
Michael Kyprianou’s Christos Galanos looks at recent caselaw.
The availability of interim relief is often crucial in ensuring satisfaction of any final court judgment or arbitral award. An interim injunction can ensure that property is not alienated while a case is still pending. In other cases it can level the playing field if one party (or even non-party) is restricting access to information material to the case. The ability to apply for interim relief is a vital tool for any legal jurisdiction. Continue reading “Interim injunctions for the freezing of assets and disclosure of documents and information”
MARKET VIEW – ARBITRATION
Why are so few awards rendered by the Swiss Chambers’ Arbitration Institution subject to challenge proceedings in the country’s courts? Rainer Füeg, the institution’s Executive Director, speaks to Lenz & Staehelin partner Martin Burkhardt
Martin Burkhardt, Lenz & Staehelin: With a growing number of arbitral institutions, why should a party use your institution?
Rainer Füeg, Swiss Chambers’ Arbitration Institution: Arbitration proceedings under the Swiss rules of international arbitration are efficient, reliable and cost-effective. They are administered in four languages: English, German, French and Italian. In arbitration proceedings where the amount in dispute does not exceed CHF1m, expedited procedures will apply; in such cases, the award shall be made within six months from the date on which the secretariat of the Institution submitted the file to the arbitral tribunal. More generally, the members of the institution and its arbitral tribunal are experienced international arbitration practitioners.
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. Continue reading “Stockholm syndromes”
MARKET VIEW – ARBITRATION
What’s next for the institution that pioneered the now-ubiquitous emergency arbitrator provision? WilmerHale partner John Pierce talks to American Arbitration Association senior vice president Richard Naimark to find out
In the context of dispute resolution, ‘US-style’ rarely denotes a positive quality. Be it for the brand of aggressive cross-examination practised in courts from New York to Nevada, or a class action system whose excesses are slammed by European legislators when introducing their own forms of collective redress, American lawyers are seen by many as having much to answer for. Such criticisms are to some extent offset by the influence such practitioners continue to exert on the global stage, with international arbitration being no exception. Indeed, London-headquartered Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer aside, the industry’s busiest players are, to a firm, American. Given this predominance, it is to be expected that US-style practices would bleed into international arbitration – the most unloved and increasingly prevalent of which remains its approach to document production.
