TFL Vsebine / Revija Slovenska arbitražna praksa

In October 2012, the School of International Arbitration, Queen Mary, University of London, published its fourth empirical survey (hereinafter the “Survey”), the second sponsored by the global law firm, White & Case. The Survey sought to answer questions about current and preferred practices in the arbitral process. In comparison to school's past surveys, the 2012 Survey stands out by a much broader and diverse sample of respondents, namely views were sought not only from in-house counsel, but also from private practitioners and arbitrators. As a consequence, the final number of respondents was considerably larger than in earlier surveys – the Survey harvested 710 questionnaire responses supplemented with 104 qualitative interviews, which makes it the most comprehensive empirical survey conducted in the field of international arbitration. Most respondents were private practitioners (53%), followed by arbitrators (26%) and in-house counsel (10%). The remaining 11% of the sample consisted of counsel working at arbitral institutions, academics and expert witnesses. The fact that more than 70% of respondents were involved in more than 5 international arbitrations in the past 5 years from the time of completing the Survey indicates that the captured data represents a fair degree of experience with the subject matter. In addition, the representativeness of the sample was ensured as much as possible in relation to the legal background of the respondents (48% had civil law background while 44% common law background) and their geographic location (the majority came from Western Europe and North America).