INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION 1/3LY
IN CONVERSATION WITH LOUISE BARRINGTON 35
LOUISE So we decided to limit numbers at the Hong Kong moot. At first we liked 64 teams but the next year the numbers rose to 83 and they steadily increased to the point when we said that our absolute maximum would be 100. And now we’ve even exceeded that, with 107 for Vis East 12. But each year I say, absolutely no more! And the growth has slowed. ALEC The growth seems to mirror the rise in the number of students who are interested in international arbitration. There has been an increase in the number of schools which offer arbitration as a module. Do you know how many of the teams participate in the moot as part of their course? LOUISE It’s interesting that you ask that question because we do ask the students to tell us during the week by filling out feedback forms. They tell us what kind of support they receive from their schools with tackling the Vis East problems and whether it’s from teachers or just from people that they know who are willing to help. We also ask about what sort of financial and professional support they receive in attending the moot and whether they receive any formal course credit for participating. It’s interesting to compare the different approaches and levels of support by academic institutions. For instance, this year we have a team that entered without a coach and reached the quarter finals. On the other hand, there’s also a team that has 13 people coaching it. While some of the universities award credit for the moot, plenty of teams do it completely without credit or any assistance from their institution. Another thing to note is that there is a whole culture, and indeed an economy, which has grown up around us in the form of pre-moots. Pre-moots are changing the nature of the Vis Moots, by making it far more professional. The enormous transition that we used to see over the four days of the general rounds has in many cases has disappeared. By the time the participants come to us, many teams have been to two, three, four, or even five pre-moots. Some of them have done 60 arguments against other schools before they come to Hong Kong. Conversely, there are also the teams that I mentioned who not only don’t have a coach but they certainly don’t have money to be running around the world participating in pre-moots and so they are always at a disadvantage. They have to be really fabulous and really motivated to be able succeed. Obviously these people are.
ALEC This tallies with my experience of sitting as an arbitrator for Vis East. This year in Hong Kong, I saw a very, very slick and polished team from a US University on their first day and I asked them in the feedback how many pre-moots they had been involved in. They said they had done three. LOUISE Three pre-moots means at least six to twelve arguments. ALEC Exactly. So they have no notes and they’ve already reached the point that you would expect people to get to by the end of the week, if they’ve progressed that far at all. They are coming here to argue, rather than to really develop. There’s not much you can really do about that because it’s just the way that they are doing their prep. But there are lots of resources going into it. LOUISE There are tremendous resources going into it. I’m finding some arbitrators who say “Well I’m not going to come to Hong Kong because I’ve been doing team work in my country” or “I’ve been to three or four pre-moots around the region already so I’m a little petered out now, sorry”. Or, you get some teams that say “Well I can’t debate against this team because I got them in a pre-moot so I saw that argument.” So they’re conscious even before they have arrived. My own feeling is if they judged a team in a pre-moot, unless they have a problem with debating them again during the Vis East, then I just can’t do anything about it. I don’t have enough arbitrators to deal with that, especially when we don’t know about it until they arrive in Hong Kong! ALEC I can completely understand. Speaking of resources and the explosion of pre-moots, I can imagine that law firms have got more involved. Do you know what percentage of teams get support of one sort or another, like coaching or perhaps financial assistance, from disputes teams in law firms? LOUISE I think that’s happening more often now, at least in countries which have an arbitration culture. However, it really depends upon the culture and system because coming from somewhere like Cambodia, for example, you could probably count on one hand the number of lawyers there that have actually done an international arbitration.
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