Originally from Investment Treaty Arbitration and International Law Volume 16

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MR. IAN LAIRD: Welcome everybody to Crowell & Moring here in Washington, DC. Today is October 14, 2022. I always like to remind myself of the day, particularly when it’s a Friday, so welcome. It’s great to see so many friends and colleagues back in person. It’s been a couple of years for the JURIS conferences to be back in person, so this is fantastic. I appreciate seeing you all, and it’s nice to be able to chat face to face, six feet apart, of course, because we’re all very conscious. It’s really great to see you all. As introductory comments, I just want to say what a pleasure it is for Crowell to be hosting this year’s JURIS International Arbitration Investment Arbitration Conference. It’s the 16th annual conference. First, Todd Weiler, as the founder of this conference, and JURIS Conferences held this conference first in 2007. I remember we were in the Mayflower Hotel; it was just something very new and unique. The concept of this conference is one that really has no equal in the arbitration conference world, which many of us spent a lot of time on the circuit. This combination of bringing together older, more experienced practitioners with some of the younger practitioners to actually have a debate. A lot of conferences just have a lot of gray in them, people agreeing on topics. One of the things we do here is we want to encourage contrary positions. In fact, that’s baked into the model. We have two authors, as you know, who are assigned contrary positions. Positions they may not actually hold, and they’ll all give you their caveats, I’m sure. But that being said, part of the exercise is, sometimes we argue positions that aren’t necessarily ours, but which either our clients or the moment requires, and we use our skills as advocates. I think that’s part of the exercise here as well, to generate the discussion of having those contrary views, and then going to the panel, and we always have a great panel of folks who then will comment and give their views and add to the discussion.