Originally from Practice of International Litigation - 2nd Edition

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Arbitration has long had a practice of arbitrators’ doing their own
work. As a result, senior lawyers from large law firms have had to adjust to
organizing their own files and conducting the kind of review of records and
legal sources that, in their practice, they delegate to junior lawyers. But this
is not the universally followed practice, particularly in continental Europe,
where persons known as “law secretaries” are not infrequently used to assist
arbitral tribunals. Recent guidelines issued by two institutions that
administer arbitrations—the International Chamber of Commerce and
JAMS—have dealt with the issues raised by the use of law secretaries, and
do so in markedly different ways.

The most recent White & Case/Queen Mary College survey of
arbitration users and practitioners confirms what was generally understood
through anecdotal evidence: that law secretaries are fairly commonly used,
especially in Continental Europe, where, according to the survey, they were
used by 35 percent of the respondents, compared to much lower
percentages in the United States and Asia. The law secretary is frequently a
young lawyer who is retained by the tribunal, usually the chairman of a
three-person panel, to assist in various ways in the conduct of an arbitration
and the preparation of the award.

But there can be troubling consequences of the use of law
secretaries. For example, one of us fell into a conversation at an arbitration
conference with a young man who spoke knowledgably about a pending
arbitration in which one of us was counsel. He indicated that he had been
working with the chairman, unbeknownst to the parties. This individual’s
identity, background and role had not been disclosed to the parties, nor had