Originally from Investment Treaty Arbitration and International Law Volume 15

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MR. TODD WEILER: Good morning, everybody, or afternoon or all the rest of it. Thanks very much for coming into our 15th annual conference. And this is our second virtual conference and hopefully our last even though it’s been a lot of fun doing it this way. I’m glad that everyone could join us. And we’ve again got a great package for everybody over the next four weeks. In addition, we also, of course, have a wonderful speaker, we have Ed Magnuson who’s going to be speaking, giving our address of that next week. So lots to look forward to. Today, of course, we have a very, very topical topic we have the new rules that will all guide us in the future with regard to our arbitral lives. And we have unfortunately for the core authors, we’ve given them no choice but to take one side of an issue with regard to these rules. And of course, I’ll save everybody the effort so that they don’t have to do it themselves in terms of the authors—their views don’t necessarily reflect their own views, or the views we told them they had to come up with. So while the ideas are theirs, we gave them the position. So it does not reflect necessarily what they want themselves. It’s what they were asked to do. So our speakers, by the way, so our authors, first we have Namrata Shah, and she’s a principal associate at Rashmikant and Partners in Mumbai. And she specializes in commercial and arbitration litigation. And she’s dual qualified in India and New York, holds a master’s degree from Columbia, previously worked in Chambers and even had some time in the U.S. so it’s going to be fun to have her give us her thoughts. And we also have Mercy Okiro, advocate of the High Court of Kenya, trained arbitrator, trained mediator, and construction adjudicator. She is also an accredited tutor and assessor of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators and also has involvement with the Nairobi Center for International Arbitration. She’s also an adjunct faculty. And she also holds an MA in her cases in international studies.