MARITIME ARBITRATION
Recommendations for maritime arbitration LET’S GET STRAIGHT TO THE POINT. CASES OF MARITIME ARBITRATION ARE SIMPLY NOT MUCH FUN AT ALL. THERE ARE NO WINNERS. AND YET UNFORTUNATELY, COMPANIES IN THE MARITIME SECTOR SOMETIMES ALSO GO TO COURT. IF YOU ARE ABOUT TO START AN ARBITRATION, READ THE FOLLOWING TIPS BEFORE YOU COMMENCE.
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irst of all, make sure to grab your calculator. Do you perhaps disagree with a supplier or a client? You certainly have every right to do so, but bear in mind that the other party thinks they are right as well. How can you go about it? Should you simply go to court and hope for the best? Stop right there! Before starting an arbitration, take out your calculator (preferably together with the other party) and ask yourself the following questions: – What is the financial volume of the contents of the case? – What are the costs of the employees required to properly support your case? – Due to the arbitration, how many manhours (expressed in euros) will you be missing for other projects? – What are the expected lawyer fees? You should as a maritime company consider how much of the budget is left to work with after subtracting employee costs, missing man-hours, and lawyer fees from the case’s financial volume. The answer is usually nihil.
Maritime arbitration project management
This part is often overlooked, but ever so important. Imagine your case does lead to arbitration, then what do you need to know? Firstly, cases of arbitration take a long time and processes are slow. Secondly, it is important to check whether you have sufficient experience to guide an arbitration case, because your lawyer will not do this for you. A lawyer will only support you with
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the case’s legal aspects. The advice is to hire an experienced entity to handle your maritime arbitration project management. Work with an entity that understands both the complex (technical) maritime and the legal language to ensure that the whole process runs smoothly and is as clear to you as possible.
What to avoid
You don’t want to start complex and long processes that will cost a fortune. In order to understand what lawyer fees entail, let’s explore how arbitration works and why it takes so long. First, a court must be appointed to review the arbitration. That alone can take months. The court obviously needs to know the exact nature of the dispute, which is why you will, together with
maritime legal experts, need to draw up the exact list of issues. You would think that the court will rapidly make a decision after this. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The court will put maximum pressure on you and the opposing party to first come to an agreement. This agreement can sometimes take years. And yes, your lawyers, the court, and the maritime legal experts won’t stop sending you invoices during this time. The costs can add up to hundreds of euros per person per hour.
s h i p b u i l d i n g -i n d u s tr y. e u
22-04-2021 12:15
