On 7 November 2024, the SCC Arbitration Institute (“SCC”) hosted a discussion on security for costs in international arbitration, with Anna Joubin-Bret, Secretary of UNCITRAL; Dr. Faris Nasrallah, Head of Arbitration at Crescent Petroleum; Dr. Monique Sasson, Partner DeliSasson and arbitrator with ARBITRA; Jake Lowther, Specialist Counsel, SCC Arbitration Institute, and moderated by Dr Crina…
This is the third post in ICCA’s series of reports on the ICCA 2024 Congress (“Congress”), which took place in Hong Kong. This post reports on the events of Tuesday, 7 May 2024, the second full day of the Congress. As noted in the coverage of Day 1 of the Congress, the theme of this…
On 5 February 2024, the Dubai Court of Cassation (“DCC”) issued a judgment in Commercial Case No. 821/2023 (“DCC Judgment”). It upheld an earlier judgment of the Dubai Court of Appeal (“CoA”) which set aside an arbitration award issued under the ICC Rules of Arbitration 2021 (“ICC Rules 2021”) in part concerning the recovery of…
On the first day of the 2023 Seoul ADR Festival, Secretariat Advisors hosted a double feature of panels relating to arbitration costs. The first panel focusing on the recovery of arbitration costs featured James Chun (foreign attorney, Kim & Chang), Inkoo Lee (manager, Secretariat), and Bruno Savoie (foreign attorney, City-Yuwa Partners). Messrs. Lee and Savoie…
In a judgment issued by the Dubai Court of Cassation (“COC”) on 8 June 2023 (Dubai Court of Cassation No. 1514/2022 Commercial), the COC confirmed that the condition precedent of referring the dispute to the engineer prior to filing arbitral proceedings is an issue pertaining to admissibility, not jurisdiction. The same judgment also provided insight…
The 2022 report of Colombia’s National Agency for Legal Defense of the State (the “Agency”) provides insightful information about costs in investment arbitration (the “2022 Report”). Based on a statistical analysis, it (i) establishes current trends and criteria in connection with the allocation of costs in investment arbitration, and (ii) determines the average costs of an…
International arbitration is reputed for its flexibility shaped by the underlying principle of party autonomy. Past years have witnessed the development of various types of funding arrangements for arbitration users, including third-party funding (“TPF”) and, most recently, alternative fee arrangements with counsel (“AFAs”) in Singapore and Hong Kong. While these new initiatives undoubtedly increase flexibility…
The first full day of the ICCA Congress took place on Monday, September 19. Delegates gathered early in the morning for a keynote speech by Louise Arbour, former Canadian diplomat, Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, High Commissioner for Refugees, Chief Prosecutor for the Yugoslavia and Rwanda Tribunals and current Senior Counsel at BLG….
The increasing cost of resolving disputes has become very concerning. While this phenomenon is not altogether new, the rising trend in recent times has given rise to a situation in which impecunious claimholders may be deprived of access to justice. Indeed, even companies with deep pockets now seek innovative ways of managing the costs of…
In Singapore, lawyers and their clients will soon be able to enter into conditional fee agreements (“CFAs”) for arbitrations and certain court proceedings. CFAs provide parties with an alternative to traditional fee arrangements and third-party funding (“TPF”) by enabling part or all of their lawyers’ fees and costs, as well as an uplift fee, to…
At present, Hong Kong lawyers are prohibited from charging outcome related fees in arbitration. As discussed in a previous blog, the landscape started to change since the publication of a Consultation Paper by the Outcome Related Fee Structures for Arbitration Sub-committee (the “Sub-committee“) of the Law Reform Commission of Hong Kong (the “Commission“). The Sub-committee…
The recent English Commercial Court decision in Tenke Fungurume Mining SA v Katanga Contracting Services SAS [2021] EWHC 3301 (Comm) has provided an interesting further comment on the broad discretion available to tribunals in English-seated arbitrations to award the costs of third party funding as part of costs awards. The decision by Mrs Justice Moulder…
On November 23, 2021, Ecuador’s Attorney General (“AG”), Iñigo Salvador Crespo announced the creation of a new institutional framework for handling disputes brought against the state and state entities with the vision of preventing and reducing litigation, particularly costly international arbitrations. The Institutional Strengthening of the Attorney General’s Office Project (“PROFIP” for its initials in…
The Singapore Court of Appeal (“CA”) recently handed down CBX and anor v CBZ and ors [2021] SGCA(I) 3 (“CBX”), setting aside, exceptionally, the awards.1)The views expressed in this article are solely the views of the authors, and are not representative of the organisations they are affiliated with. Significantly, the law was clarified, to a…
Each of the major arbitral institutions requires that parties furnish some form of advance on costs before an arbitration can proceed. The advance on costs is a deposit paid by the parties to cover fees and expenses of the tribunal and the institution’s administrative expenses (“Advance”). Whilst payment of an Advance is often perceived as…
There has been a lot of debate in recent years on whether attorneys’ fees, or in other words counsels’ fees, can be awarded under the applicable laws in the United Arab Emirates (“UAE”). This post examines a recent decision, Cassation No. 990/2019 Commercial, issued by the Dubai Court which deals with attorneys’ fees. Prior court…
The allocation of pre-award interest is a standard feature of most international arbitration proceedings and is often contested before a tribunal. The complexity is accentuated when a tribunal is unable to render a timely award for procedural reasons beyond its own control and beyond the parties’ control. The delay caused by the rescheduling of evidentiary…
As the global pandemic has constrained in-person gatherings, many arbitration practitioners will have foregone most of their summer travel. Fortunately, for this summer’s holiday (quiz), we can all take a trip together to Transparency Land, where all arbitrators and institutions are above average, but may not all be equal in how they manage proceedings. With…
On 19 July 2019, Beijing Arbitration Commission a.k.a. Beijing International Arbitration Center (the “BAC/BIAC”) released its amended Arbitration Rules (the “Rules”) and Fee Schedule (the “Fee Schedule”), both of which will take effect on 1 September 2019. An Overview of BAC/BIAC’s New Fee Schedule The amendments introduced many reforms to reduce the time and…
As the recent launch of the Prague Rules and the discussions at the Paris Arbitration Week 2019 and London International Disputes Week 2019 have shown, discussions around time and cost efficiency in arbitration remain a key concern of users and the arbitration community. This article accordingly reports on the launch event held by Delos Dispute…
“Developing arbitration into a matured system of adjudication that can fully compete with litigation may create tension with its promise of providing a quick, fair, and flexible way to resolve a dispute. … Some years ago, Johnny Veeder posed the question, “whose arbitration is this anyway?” Perhaps the time has now come for the arbitration…
The admissibility of illegal evidence in international commercial arbitration is for sure, at the moment, a widely discussed topic among law students and arbitration lawyers thanks to this year’s problem at the Willem C Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot competition (“Vis Moot Problem”). The Kluwer Arbitration Blog (“KAB”) covered the topic extensively as well in…
This is the 2nd part of the report highlighting the most significant arbitration-related decisions of the Swiss Federal Supreme Court (the “Supreme Court”) published in 2018. Jura Novit Arbiter In the decision 4A_525/2017 of 9 August 2018, published on 26 September 2018, the Supreme Court dealt with the principle of jura novit arbiter, controversial…
This is an introduction to the so-called “Final Offer Arbitration” (FOA), sometimes also referred to as pendulum or baseball arbitration. FOA is a model of arbitration that originated in the late 1940s and consolidated in the 1970s in the USA to resolve labour disputes in the public sector and the baseball league, hence the name….
