{"id":559,"date":"2010-04-26T11:32:12","date_gmt":"2010-04-26T15:32:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/?p=559"},"modified":"2010-04-26T11:32:12","modified_gmt":"2010-04-26T15:32:12","slug":"new-book-on-international-arbitration-and-mediation-a-practical-guide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/2010\/04\/new-book-on-international-arbitration-and-mediation-a-practical-guide\/","title":{"rendered":"New Book on "International Arbitration and Mediation: A Practical Guide""},"content":{"rendered":"

Arbitrators, mediators, lawyers, ADR trainers and professors have many excellent guides to assist them in doing their job.\u00a0 But what about the guy inside the company who has a cross-border dispute on his hands and needs to deal with it with intelligence, elegance and efficiency?\u00a0 Or at least not flub it?\u00a0 Two deeply experienced lawyers have come to the rescue.<\/p>\n

\"Arbitration<\/a><\/p>\n

Michael McIlwrath of General Electric (in Florence, Italy) and John Savage of Shearman & Sterling (in Paris, Singapore, and now Washington) have offered the most useful and worldly-wise single volume imaginable in International Arbitration and Mediation: A Practical Guide.\u00a0<\/a> Its tone is both reader-friendly and authoritative, and its scope is exactly as broad as the problem itself, which is simply and clearly put at the outset:<\/p>\n

Today’s business world is about risk.\u00a0 Those who can accept risk — and manage the downside — will be rewarded.\u00a0 In international contracts, dispute resolution often is or should be the single most important consideration in deciding whether a particular risk is one to accept.\u00a0 The value of a [cross-border] contract may ultimately reside in how disputes arising out of it will be resolved.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is a tantalizing proposition, but coming from business lawyers (rather than ADR wonks) it is arresting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The structure of the book reveals the breadth of its contents.\u00a0 The first section explains the elements of a\u00a0dispute resolution agreement in a\u00a0 cross-border deal, and the second addresses the process of negotiating such an agreement.\u00a0 The authors note that, despite the nomenclature in the literature, one doesn’t draft<\/em> a dispute resolution clause — one negotiates<\/em> it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Always commercially rational, the authors “propose negotiation strategies that treat the other party’s inflexibility as a potential opportunity that can be quantified and assessed just like any other form of commercial risk.”<\/p>\n

The book then gets down to it, addressing what to do “When the Dispute Arises,” how to prepare for and get the most value from “International Settlement Negotiation and Mediation” and\u00a0“The Conduct of the Arbitration,” and in a lucid and compact presentation, what to do “After the Arbitration: Challenge, Recognotion and Enforcement of the Award.”\u00a0 The volume concludes with a concise description of ICSID and BIT arbitration, and attaches particularly useful Appendices,\u00a0including model clauses, a useful template for internal Early Case Assessment, model requests and responses to arbitrate, forms of privilege logs, model BITs, and so on.<\/p>\n

The authors also\u00a0show a masterful command of\u00a0international mediation and arbitration institutions.\u00a0\u00a0They explain the rules and fees of each one, the advantages and disadvantages of existing institutions, the costs and the benefits.\u00a0 These are sections that could have been written only by someone responsible for writing the checks.<\/p>\n

Another tell-tale mark of the book’s reliability are the anecdotes that are sprinkled about the text, containing horrendous real-life examples of arrogance, stupidity, ignorance and\u00a0miscalculation that \u00a0the authors have actually witnessed.\u00a0 These boxed narratives are captioned “Not that this ever really happens….” and are delightful.\u00a0 Or they would be if one could recover from the bare shock of the stories.\u00a0 Here you learn of:<\/p>\n