Piercing the Bubble: When Outsiders Discover Arbitration…

Presentation

The PAW is one of the highlights of the “arbitration bubble”, where arbitration practitioners from all over the world regularly meet other arbitration practitioners or in-house counsel specialized in managing international arbitration matters. Yet, more often than not, when starting international arbitration proceedings, a counsel or a party, or sometimes even an arbitrator, will have no clue of what arbitration really is about. Beyond the general issue of the legitimacy or not of an “arbitration Bar”, this can sometimes give rise to delicate questions, in particular about the need to level the playing field and the role of arbitral tribunals in ensuring the equality of the parties, as well as the existence or not of specific duties of the chair person when faced with one of the co-arbitrators being completely new to arbitration.
We’ll have a lively and surely thought-provoking panel discussion with our guest speakers, Laure Levi, a Belgian attorney specialized in European law, who intervened recently as (sole) counsel assisting her client company in two parallel arbitrations held at the Permanent Court of Arbitration, without any prior experience of arbitral proceedings, and Matej Kurent, currently president of the Slovenian-French Business Club, former CEO of a Belgian company, who recently discovered arbitration as a party representative.