Emergency Arbitration in Practice

This guide is written for in-house counsel and commercial managers who may one day need urgent protection before an arbitral tribunal has been appointed. It explains how the emergency arbitrator procedure works, what an application must show and how quickly a decision can be expected.

The central chapters address evidence. Applicants must usually demonstrate urgency, a reasonable prospect of success and a risk of harm that damages could not repair. We set out the kinds of material that tend to persuade, from contemporaneous correspondence to expert statements prepared at short notice.

The final section considers what happens next: how emergency orders are treated by national courts, when a parallel court application remains necessary, and how the emergency phase can be used to shape the arbitration that follows.