Originally from World Arbitration And Mediation Review (WAMR)

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PERSPECTIVES FROM THE CORPORATE

COUNSEL: CHALLENGES TO DELIVERING
THE PARTY’S MESSAGE EFFECTIVELY
AND EFFICIENTLY
Alan R. Crain, Jr., Moderator*

Why don’t we go ahead and begin the last panel. If people are
happy to have the last panel stand between everybody and a
drink I suspect. I’m Alan Crain. We have all our bios in the write
up so you can catch those. On your far right is Dennis Grindinger
with Hunt Oil, and in the middle Javier Rubinstein with PWC, and
our very recalcitrant and difficult lawyer from earlier whom
everybody knows, Eric [Liebeler of Siemens].

On this panel, we all have a lot of experience with arbitration
and from many different perspectives. Those of you who know
me, know I served as an arbitrator for close to 30 years in dozens
of cases, but the perspective we’re all bringing to this panel is that
of our role as in-house counsel and how we see our roles and the
whole process. So, as professionals within an organization and
within corporations, we owe a professional duty to our corporate
client, but we also owe a fiduciary duty to the same client, as do
all its directors and officers. We owe it to our investors and the
owners of the company. So, we’re there to properly shepherd the
funds, their investment, and to make sure they get their return on
the investment long-term. They want the rewards of the risks the
company takes, and that’s how I always look at it, the rewards of
the risk.

And one of the risks that we have is to have a dispute. As (I
think) Wendy Miles put it so eloquently earlier: arbitration exists
because the parties have selected it. So we are the people who
are involved with the selection of arbitration and we have certain
expectations with regard to risk and with regard to what happens.
As mentioned, one of the risks is that you’ll have disputes, and we
have selected arbitration to address such disputes for a number of