GENCY F
or more than half a century, international arbitration has proven increasingly popular as a way to settle disputes between parties headquartered in different countries. The reasons for the attractiveness are many, but chief among them is the reluctance of parties to have a dispute heard in a foreign court. Other perceived benefits include the promise of confidentiality, a more enforceable decision at the end of the day, a faster, cheaper process — at least in theory — and the ability to lay out the ground rules for dispute resolution ahead of time.
"In international business, arbitration takes on a whole different level of impor-
tance," says Mark Gelowitz, a litigation partner at Osler Hoskin & Harcourt LLP. "You have parties who maybe don't speak the same language, they don't have the same legal system, and they don't have any particular confidence in the legal sys- tem of their counterparty. In circumstances like that it begins to make a lot more sense to have a regime set up where both parties are going to have confidence in the decision-maker, they are going to have confidence in the independence of the result that is reached, and they are going to have confidence in the ability to enforce that result."
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