Thomas Snider, Reem Faqihi and Dalal Alhouti discuss the impact of technology on the arbitration landscape for Legal Community MENA

In a recent interview with Legal Community MENA, Thomas Snider (Head of International Arbitration), Reem Faqihi (Associate) and Dalal Alhouti (Knowledge Development Lawyer), discuss the impact of technology on the arbitration landscape.

See a snippet of the interview below: 

As an arbitrator and panel member of various arbitral institutions, how do you navigate the balance between traditional arbitration practices and emerging technological solutions? 

The balance between traditional arbitration practices and emerging technologies requires careful consideration in practice and is more about evolution than revolution. 

Traditional practices place an emphasis on established procedures, which helps ensure fairness and predictability, but can often be time-consuming and expensive. Emerging technological solutions tend to offer exciting possibilities, possible cost savings and increased efficiency, but may require new training and investment in hardware. 

In some ways arbitration is the perfect environment for new technologies because the process is flexible – the tribunal and the parties can simply decide to adjust the procedure to incorporate the new technology in the way they think is best for the management of the dispute (for example, using a central online document platform to host the trial bundle). However, there can be challenges. Perhaps one party is not as experienced as the others in some technological area, leading to a disadvantage. And some arbitrators (even relatively young ones) face challenges in adopting to new ways and will still ask for paper bundles even if the parties themselves have moved on to using digital bundles. 

Read the full piece in Legal Community MENA here.