Smith International Legal Consultants, P.A.

If you are like us and spend quite a lot of time at arbitration conferences, you will soon learn that conferences can lack really aggressive topics. Sometimes the panelists want to avoid them, other times the audience does not want to hear it, and then there are times when it feels like many of the main topics have just been discussed enough. So what is the future of arbitration?

In many ways, the next stage of arbitration may be the growth of claims between countries and investors based on contracts. Many of the growing economies have aggressive economies that include a sizable state presence, like Brazil, China, and India. Other emerging economies are following similar models, where you see the public sector blending with the private to support industries through Latin America, Asia, and Africa. In many of these countries, there is no recourse to treaty arbitration through ICSID, or the government is contracting directly with the investor and bypassing ICSID for other arbitral institutions, like the ICC, the SCC, and the ICDR. And even when the arbitration is in a different institution, there can be difficult and challenging issues to resolve regarding the parties' expectations, the role of the institution, and the role of third-party interest groups. How do these claims differ from more traditional ICSID treaty claims? Are they the same kinds of claims as commercial arbitration? How does one calculate damages in these contract-treaty claims? These questions and many others are the subject of Young ICCA's upcoming program, "The Future of Arbitration: The Boundary between Contract and Treaty Claims."

The program will be on September 15, in Buenos Aires, and it will be Young ICCA's first event in South America. There will be three roundtables with excellent speakers looking at three important issues: investor and state action in times of distress, the unique challenges of contract claims against state entities, and how to avoid double recovery in contract and treaty claims. Following the program, there will a joint program hosted by a number of young arbitration associations and the opening of the Spanish-language international arbitration moot, hosted at the University of Buenos Aires.

So if you can make it to Buenos Aires in September (and who wouldn't want to go), you can take the opportunity to participate in Young ICCA's interesting event and stick around for the moot, which will have 53 schools this year (an amazing number after only four years of existence). If you can make it, stay by and say hello.

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