INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION 1/3LY
20 YEARS OR SO AGO, SOME BELIEVED THAT ARBITRATION HAD BECOME THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN, BUT THAT WAS A MISGUIDED VIEW AT THE TIME, AND IS MORE SO TODAY.
CHALLENGES FOR THE ARBITRAL COMMUNITY
We should also ensure that standards are maintained in the many new regional arbitration centres that emerge with growing regularity. Established institutions like the LCIA have an important role to play in setting an example and in setting standards. One thing that does not concern me is where the next generation of excellent international arbitrators will come from. We see in young arbitrator groups, like the LCIA’s YIAG, a wealth of talent and remarkable ability from every jurisdiction, including those where today it’s harder to find good arbitrators, which will provide all the tribunals that parties are likely to require for the next generation.
BEN What do you perceive to be the biggest challenges, or problems, that you’re witnessing in arbitration at the moment? ADRIAN We have to guard against complacency and ensure that our rules and the services we provide are relevant and attractive to our users. 20 years or so ago, some believed that arbitration had become the only game in town, but that was a misguided view at the time, and is more so today. There are ever more, and ever more viable, alternatives to arbitration available to the business and legal communities. Not only in other forms of ADR, such as adjudication, dispute review boards, expert determination, mediation and so on, but also in the state courts of many jurisdictions, which have striven to provide more expeditious and cost-effective services. This is why it’s so important for the LCIA to remain up to date, and relevant, by listening to its users, whether they be the parties, transactional lawyers, arbitrators, academics, or others. It’s also important to recognise and nurture the synergy between the courts of jurisdiction and arbitration; a relationship that should be supportive and harmonious. We need also to strike a balance between proper self- regulation through the adoption of voluntary guidelines (on such issues as conflicts of interest and the conduct of party representatives) and an excess of guidelines. Rules and regulations that start life as soft law but aspire to become hard law and through the sheer plethora of such regulations, produce clashes and confusion.
THE LCIA: A DECADE ON...
BEN Before we wrap up, if you were looking at the LCIA in 10 years’ time, what would you like to see? ADRIAN I should, naturally, like to see that the LCIA has continued to grow at the same rate that it has grown at over the past decade or so. I should also like to see each of our overseas offices standing on its own feet, and with case-loads that vindicate the decisions to establish them. And, lastly, I would like to see that arbitration, and particularly LCIA arbitration, is still being held in high regard as an effective means of resolving the broadest range of commercial and treaty disputes.
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