Large-scale arbitration has been very much in the news in
recent years, from class arbitrations in the United States to mass

arbitration in the investment context. Are these procedures the

wave of the future or simply isolated phenomena arising out of

unique circumstances? Can the international legal community

expect to see more of these types of procedures in the coming

years? Carolyn Lamm, past President of the ABA and lead

advocate for the claimants in Abaclat v. Argentine Republic,1

discusses her experience with large-scale arbitration and her

views on how clients and counsel can prepare themselves for the

changes that lie ahead.

 

 

This presentation will be relatively pragmatic in approach in

terms of drawing the distinctions between the mass claims class

actions and the debate that we see going on in U.S. jurisprudence

– as distinguished from ICSID cases, because they are distinctly

different. I will talk about some of the distinctions and then talk

about how one puts together the needed background, as we did in

Abaclat v. Argentine Republic, which was done with a fabulous

team through a collective effort and a lot of work on both sides of

the Atlantic.

 

I commend to you the IBA Legal Practice Division Guidelines

on Recognizing and Enforcing Foreign Judgments for Collective

Redress.2 These Guidelines are very necessary at this time. At the

beginning, the IBA Legal Practice Division recognized that, along

with globalization of business streams, it was inevitable that a