What Paris Taught Me About Arbitration

I trained in Paris almost by accident — a secondment that was meant to last six months and became two years. It changed how I think about arbitration more than anything I've done since.

English commercial lawyers, myself included when I started, tend to think of arbitration as litigation with a different venue. The French tradition I trained in treats it as something closer to a negotiated process that happens to have a binding outcome — more attentive to how the parties will need to continue existing near each other afterward, even when they're on opposite sides of a treaty claim against a state.

I don't think either tradition is fully right on its own. But I've never stopped being grateful that I learned the second one before I learned to assume the first was the only way to do this.