Originally from Dispute Resolution Journal

Arbitration proceedings are, paradoxically, both typically private and not necessarily confidential.1 The privacy of an arbitration setting may offer significant advantages to participants, such as its’ more business-like, efficient and low-key setting for dispute resolution.2 Yet, the privacy of the process does not guarantee that information revealed in the course of arbitration proceedings is “automatically confidential.”3 Indeed, while arbitrators themselves may be bound to a general obligation of confidentiality,4 the parties (and their counsel) are generally not so restricted, absent agreement or arbitral order.