How pale male and stale is the world of international dispute resolution

 So all right, so very good afternoon, everyone, a very warm welcome to our Research Futures webinar.

My name is Leila Choukroune professor of international economic law and director of the University of Portsmouth Democratic Citizenship theme.

So today we have the great pleasure to welcome our colleague Lise Alm from the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce.

Lise is a lawyer and a business developer with a background in tech community.

She's the head now of the Business Development at the Arbitration Institute at the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce.

She works with innovation, product development and communication.

Her role includes analysing the future of international dispute resolution with a special focus on the intersection between dispute resolution and emerging technologies.

She has a background in mergers and acquisitions, both as external counsel and in-house at Spotify, a business background heading the business department at another tech Start-Up and also as co-founder of two companies.

She spent most of her professional life navigating a male dominated world.

Well, welcome to the club then Lise.

Thank you.

Thanks for you very much.

Expected presentation.

The floor is yours.

Thank you so much for inviting me.

And this is it's a really I really look forward to talking about this and to the, I hope questions and discussion that might follow.

What we're going to be talking about today is diversity in arbitration.

And I we chose the title, How Male, Pale and Stale is the World of International Arbitration.

And the reason for choosing that outside of it being a slightly punchy way of phrasing it is also because I wanted to capture that there are now a number of diversity ways of looking at diversity.

And the focus in arbitration for a long time have been on gender diversity.

And the report that I'm going to be sharing with you today is also focussed a lot on that.

But we tried to go a little bit beyond that and both look at how pale they are, i.e.

how how white are we all?

It's a little bit tricky.

And I'm going to come back to why that's a little bit tricky.

But the other thing, of course, is gender.

How male it is that one is, is easier to define and the other one is how stale it is, which is really relating to age.

So there is a there's a preconceived notion that there's a lot of arbitrators that are fairly old, white and male, and it's not entirely incorrect.

But we wanted to look at what does it actually say.

And we have then looked at all the appointments made in an SCC case from 2015 to 2019, and that is some 1250 appointments in 690 cases.

And of course, each case is individual and each case has their own reasons for why you needed to have this that on the other.

And they may all make very much sense.

It's but when you start aggregating it up and you get the numbers that we that we see here, then you can start spotting trends.

So, I mean, that's obviously also something that when we work as an institute with these kind of questions for each individual case, we always have that case in mind.

What does this case need?

But we need to have this kind of systemic approach as well, somewhere at the back of our mind, but never, never leaving entirely in terms of what does this play into in the grand scheme of things?

So the numbers that we saw that were going to be seeing here, they're not we we weren't taken by surprise by them necessarily, but it was quite some of them surprise us and some of them were quite in line what we expected.

So I'm going to take you through it.

And I would love to see which ones that you think are potentially surprising or not.

So I'm going to do first is just say a few words about what arbitration is.

To put that in context.

Why does it matter what happens in arbitration?

What is it?

The other one is that I'm going to go through where we stand today in terms of diversity, and that is essentially going through some of the findings that we got in the diversity report.

Obviously, that one can be found online as well.

And then I'm going to try and look a little bit at what are the reasons behind this.

Why does why does this drive so much toward male, pale and stale to the extent that we think that it does?

And the other thing that I think is really, really interesting here is we are seeing quite a lot of changes here, which means that I wanted to see I wanted to talk a little bit about what the future might hold in this area.

So that's essentially what we're going to go through.

Oh, hold on.

I realise now that I started annotating, that was not intentional.

Can I can I stop doing that?

They would go.

It will go so first of all, very briefly, what is arbitration?

So arbitration is an alternative to court.

So you either go to court or you go to arbitration, you can't go to if you have chosen the one, you can't choose the other or you can't go to the other rather.

It is the main option for most commercial disputes, and especially when it comes to international disputes.

The reason for that is that if you have an award, which is the ruling from an arbitration, then you can essentially take that anywhere in the world and have that be enforceable.

There's a there's a New York convention that I believe it's now 167 or so.

You're nodding.

So I'm hoping I'm right on the number ever, ever increasing number of countries that have signed.

So an award from any of those countries can be implemented, enforced in any of the other countries.

So that makes this an extremely strong instrument and one actually of the UN's strongest and most successful instruments.

It is entirely confidential unless the parties agree to share it.

But the court is confidential and us as an institution, we are confidential.

We have to stay confidential about everything that happens.

And the other big aspect is that there is no appeal there.

The there it's a one it's a one shot.

You can only you can challenge it if you think that it's that your procedural rights have been violated, but not because you thought that the arbitrator came up with a bad award.

One thing to note as well is that the tribunal, which is essentially the tribunal of arbitrator of judges, but they called arbitrators in arbitration, they are appointed for but for each case.

So this court or this arbitration tribunal, it exists only in relation to the to the case in question.

And then that dissolves.

And then every time it comes in a new case, then we put together a new tribunal again.

And either it's one or three, sorry, that's three.

And so here at the SCC, that's why we have some 1200 appointments over the course of these five years, because we appoint with every case that comes in.

That's also one of the reasons why diversity here is is really important.

The being appointed as arbitrator is seen as quite an honorary.

It is often something that you do when you have reached quite, quite senior position in your career.

And it comes with a quite a lot of money, which is also one of the reasons why this is this is an area where diversity also is is important.

So another thing to keep in mind here is why we have arbitration, so I told you about how it works, but one of the reasons why arbitration is something that is backed by the U.N., etc., is that it's built upon the belief that countries that have functioning trade, they seldom go to war.

That sounds very large and very high, high principled, but it really is it's that simple that we need to have mechanisms that allow for international trade because that will in and of itself create for stable a stable world, a more stable world.

And for international trade to work, you need to be able to take potential disputes somewhere other than each other's courts because you may or may not trust the other the other party's domestic court system and you may run into trouble with enforcing it and so forth.

So that is one of the reasons why arbitration is so important.

But it also means that you have a lot of really, really big cases going through arbitration.

We're talking billions and billions and billions of dollars.

We're talking really important political cases where you might have a commercial conflict in the bottom of it.

But essentially it's just a political conflict that in the disguise of a contract, so to speak.

So that means that the decisions that are being made by this tribunal is is extremely can be extremely important for for the larger international poll...

for politics and for the broader scheme.

And that means that since that is done, then behind closed doors and perceived to be done by a potentially then elite group of old men, if I'm to be harsh or to portray the the prejudice around this, then that becomes extra important, since what happens behind those closed closed doors can be extremely important.

It is quite important who sits behind those doors.

So there are many reasons why we need to have a focus on these kind of questions in in arbitration.

And that's just I mean, now I've touched upon two, which is for for the arbitrators, for the for the trust of this instrument and also obviously for the quality of it.

We need to make sure that we always have access to the best pool, and that means that we can't limit ourselves.

So this is the reason why this is important.

And there has been a lot of discussion about diversity in arbitration quite a while, because essentially it has not necessarily been we're not necessarily being that great of it.

I want to just take a moment to to say when it comes to this, the world peace through world trade, motive of arbitration, there's a great short documentary that is called The Quiet Triumph that I highly recommend.

If you're interested in this and you want to see what arbitration kind of has done for the world, it was when I wonder why I have to go up early in the morning.

This is one of the ones that I look at and say, yeah, we we're doing something good.

Anyway, so I also just want to before I jump in, just say what I say, that I'm talking about an institution.

So what are we actually so I come from the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce and we are one of the big institutions in the world and we handle especially investment disputes, which essentially means that you have a state on the one side and then often a large company on the other or another state.

And we have been working a lot with both diversity and technology over well for a long time, but over the last decade at least.

And what an institute does is that we bring it we're essentially it can say that we're the Uber for arbitration, where we're the platform.

So you will have the parties, one will sue the other and they will come to us and they will say, we need the tribunal, we will appoint the tribunal, give and take a little bit there.

They might appoint themselves, but we will we will be kind of the glue that holds it together.

We will provide for the rules, the procedural rules that they do it under, and we will handle the administration of it.

So just like we we don't drive the cars for Uber, we don't we don't actually rule on the cases.

The arbitrator does that, but we make sure that you get the right arbitrator for the right case.

Right.

So when it comes to our report, then.

You can find it on on our Web page, obviously, so if you want to go in and deep dive, you have it there.

What we looked at these at these diversity markets, we looked we focussed mainly on gender and then we also looked at nationality and I put nationality in brackets here because I'm not going to deep dive too much into it.

Nationality.

We would have wanted to look at ethnicity to some extent.

It's not entirely uncomplicated to do that for very many reasons.

But one of the formal reasons for us is that it's practically really hard.

We essentially don't tag our arbitrators by ethnicity.

We do keep track of their nationality, however, because that plays a role in whether or not they can be seen to be bias in a certain case and so forth.

So we can track that.

And we did look at that.

But we it's it's an interesting thing to see whether the next step in evolving and how we work with diversity will be a larger focus on actual ethnicity.

And there has been a lot of discussion about that, especially in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S.

The next thing we looked at was age and then we looked also at repeat appointments.

And the reason why we thought that was interesting is that one of the one of our fears were that, OK, we might have decent numbers when it comes to gender, but all just appointing the same women all over.

So that actually when it looks like we have an equal number.

Which we don't, but still, oh, is it actually only ten women that hides behind that that racks up all of them?

So we wanted to see how that played out.

So those are the things that we that we have in this report.

So starting with the headline number here.

About 4/5 are men, so 80% are men.

What we can see, however, is that there is a fairly strong trend here going if we look at 2015, it was a 13%.

If we look at 2019 with 23%, which is is quite fast increase story of women.

That is, if we look at 2020, which we now have the numbers for, obviously we're actually on 30%.

So the jump from 2019 to 2020 is significant.

So I almost wish I would have done this report.

One year later, we would have even better numbers, but it's showing that this is actually happening quite fast.

If you look at societal change, this is a I'm not at all happy with where we're at with the numbers, but this is a fast moving change, which is really interesting.

The other aspect to look at here is that that the I want to say issue, but the institutions tend to take a more systemic approach to this.

So we have a part in when we appoint a part in our decision is gender diversity.

If we can, we will always make sure to promote women or to promote an equal share of women.

So that means that we actually have our numbers over this period of time is 30%, whereas the parties appoint 14%.

The CO arbitrators can also appoint the chairperson, but it's so few that you can see that.

I mean, the statistics there is one number up and down would have made a big difference.

So the main people will part is look at here is the parties and the SCC.

What is really interesting here as well is that we were 30% for the over the last five year period combined into 2020, we actually hit 47 %, which means that the institutional appointments are actually closing to equal between men and women.

And that is this trend, this overall trend where the institutions have a lot, lot more gender diverse appointment, whereas the parties don't, that is something that can be seen across all of the institutions.

We are definitely good at it.

SCC ranks well in this very well with last year.

ECAA ranks well in this also very I think they one 47% even last year.

Some of the other ranks slightly worse.

But the difference between the parties and the institutions are the same across.

What is slightly problematic with that is that the parties appoint 2/3.

So one third of the arbitrators are appointed by the institutions and we take a very active approach in pushing these numbers.

And two thirds are appointed by the parties who doesn't have this systemic approach in the same way.

And in a way, it makes me actually frustrated.

And in a way I get it because they don't also have the systemic overview.

I can look at these numbers.

I can pull them out of my computer.

They can't to the same extent.

They can only see the ones that they appoint or the ones that they appoint within their firm.

And the other aspect here is they will only they tend to have a bigger focus on that one case.

So it's there's other other drivers behind that, and I'm going to come back to that when we talk a little bit about why it looks the way it does.

But but this is this is problematic.

The other thing to look at then is, OK, one woman, one one point, but actually it matters as well.

What do we appoint?

What are women appointed as?

There is a slight hierarchy in how in what roles you get within arbitration.

So you would have the chairperson of a really big case that's kind of the top of the hierarchy, sole arbitrator in an expedited case on quite low numbers.

That's a lower end.

And then you could also have a Co-arbitrate and I'm not going to rank them as such.

But there is an aspect of this, and it's not entirely surprising then that you will see that when it comes to the.

Easier, but not easy roles as sole arbitrator, you'll find a lot more women, whereas when it comes to the heavier roles as chair and and party arbitrator, which is always by definition, then a tribunal with three people, then we have less of them.

What you also can see here is the SCC or the institutions at large appoints a lot more sole arbitrators and then we appoint some chairs and almost no party arbitrators.

And that you can also see in the numbers here, because since we pushed these questions, we pushed them where we can, but we can't actually affect the party arbitrators that much.

So that's what you will see.

There is one one area where you have more women than men.

And that is as tribunal secretary, so there we actually have a lot more women than men.

And whether that means that the tribunal secretary essentially is a role that is for a more junior, it's not a junior lawyer, but it's it's a junior arbitrator.

You're on your way there, but you're not there.

So these ones what we might be looking at here is the future people that are going to be in the other column or we might be looking at a bus pipeline or broken system.

I would imagine we're looking a little bit of both.

The other thing then is how much how big are the cases that the women and men are pointed in and the fees are directly correlated to the to the size of the case.

So big a bigger case, bigger fee.

There's a cap, but essentially that's the way it works.

And what we can see here is that if you just look at chairs because you need to compare the roll to roll, if you look at chairs, then the woman chair will make seven to two percent in average on what the male chairs will do.

And it's actually we had I think we had 11 men before we had the first woman on this list.

So if we would just rank them according to what they earned, then it was 10 men and then then a woman.

What we could see on the other side, though, is that it is quite when it comes to being appointed as sole arbitrator.

It's essentially the same.

So the biggest problem here is when it comes to the chair, a chairperson.

And it's also the median fee, which is split in a different way there, it's less of a difference.

So that what that tells essentially is that you have a few really high earners that kind of pulls out the average share.

The other thing I would try to look at where in what type of cases are they appointed in and just not just numbers, and it is very clear that the most the bar where we have the biggest difference is when we have international cases so that at least one party is international.

Those are usually also the bigger cases and the more complex cases.

And in that, we can see that when the the core arbitrators, i.e.

the arbitrators that are appointed by the parties themselves, they favour male appointments to a very large degree.

And I was actually surprised by this first at first because I was thinking, well, if you have the if the world is your oyster, what how can you not find more women?

I can see that when you're just fishing out of a national pool, it might be harder.

You have fewer to choose from.

But then I realised that actually might be the other way around.

Because when you go when you go out internationally and you look you won't have the same type of network, the same type of knowledge as you do with your own national pool.

So you're going to go with the top ones because you don't have time or knowledge to dive farther down.

And as I mentioned on just just the anecdotal evidence of the fee earners, unless you have 10 men and then a woman, if you only look at the first five, you just going to get men.

And the other thing is, this is a Swedish case and an international case.

Sweden has come quite far when it comes to equality, which means that in a way, maybe the fact if we can find more Swedish arbitrators equivalent to the Swedish sorry Swedish women arbitrators, it shows that Sweden has come a long way in this.

But when we start looking at international ones and we need to have a specific jurisdiction or whatever it might be, we need to stick to how far they have come in terms of equality when we're looking for it.

So the pool is still not necessarily the whole world.

It's that that corner of the world that we need to go to.

So.

Maybe, maybe this is not a strange thing, but we can see that this is really where this is where it goes south when it comes to gender.

So that takes us then to another aspect of this.

And that is the age.

How old are they?

How how stale are they?

Turns out somewhat stale, so the average arbitrator across the board, 55 years old, every appointment at a time of appointment, the or sorry, the average age.

If you're looking at the average arbitrator, the most arbitrators, you will see that it's the age of 45 is when it peaks.

What you also what we have then also is that women are a lot younger.

You see that the dark blue here is a lot more to the left than the the other part here.

So the average age for women is 45, whereas the average age for men is 56.

So there's an 11 years difference between the average.

Again, this is an interesting and you can be you can look at this and you can be super optimistic and say, look at all those 45 year old women, they're almost the same.

I mean, you look at the bars, there are 45 year olds getting appointments.

They're almost the same between women and men.

So obviously that's going to move through.

And soon we're going to have it all in.

In only 30 years time, we're going to be there.

Or you see, what you see here is a really bust pipeline where the women trail off somewhere.

And again, I think the answer is a bit of both.

A strange thing that we also I also see here is that for whatever reason, we tend to not appoint them when they turn 40, 50, 60 or 70 years old, it goes it goes up and down.

But on the even decades, we leave them alone to celebrate their birthday.

So then the question was, do we keep appointing the same people over and over again and sorry?

The answer is this is maybe where it surprised me a bit more, both the curve, but also this is that almost 60 percent only had one appointment with us across the board in any capacity by any by any point over this five year period, which I would say indicates that it's not elite driven.

It's not just the the elite getting the same appointments over and over again.

So amongst our 630 cases, we had 480 arbitrators.

And there are quite few that get a lot of appointments and there we could also see that there was one or two people that really, really ran off and had, I believe, 40 appointments over this period under which the SCC had appointed him because it was a him twice and the other 38 appointments came from the parties.

So obviously we can see that, look, this guy has been getting a lot of appointments, A, that's not good because his calendar is going to be booked.

That means it's going to be hard for him to manage all these cases are going on at the same time.

And B, we want to spread the graces here so we can work again.

We can work with this quite systematically, I realise now that I'm dragging on.

So I'm going to move over to the next part of this, which is a little bit of thinking of why why do we have this the way that it looks?

Because even if we're looking at something that is moving in the right direction fast, we're looking at something that is not where we want it to be.

And first, we we have a bunch of issues that relates to the pool that we can go fishing for arbitrators and to the pipeline that is filling that pool.

So essentially, if you look at who is up, who's eligible for for being an arbitrator, you would generally be looking at a partner at a law firm.

He or she could be in a big law firm or in a small firm and so forth.

And they could also be specialised doing only this, but generally that's what you're looking at.

So that means that we are we're not in the hands of, but we're very dependent on what partners you have at the law firms and they have written many books about the issues on retaining women in partner positions at the law firms, but essentially we we suffer from that as well.

The other one is unconscious bias that kicks in at all levels when it comes to how they how they they need to get the knowledge to be picked and to be able to get that knowledge and they need to get on there on the need to become counsel on the big projects and so on and so forth.

And and I mean this the unconscious bias doesn't just hit in.

When you sit and you look at the list of appointing arbitrator, it hits you it hits you so many times on the way up to that.

So it actually may mean that when it comes time to choose an arbitrator, it's entirely reasonable that you're not being picked because you didn't get to walk through all the doors that you would have needed to walk through along the line to get to have that that competence that you that you need to be an arbitrator.

And the other aspect here is lack of flexible working arrangements is something that has been brought up.

And I, I should say that these four bullets that I take here, I use the same clustering as the ICA report that came out on diversity shy of a year ago.

So it's a report of the Cross Institutional Task Force on Gender Diversity in Arbitration Proceeding is the title of that.

But you can find it also on the link here.

But then what they bring up is essentially partner work.

And in even more so, arbitration work doesn't always lend itself very well to picking up from day care.

So if you're living in a family arrangement that doesn't allow for you to be very flexible, then it might not be a good match, which is obviously flows back into the law firm retention issue that they're having.

And the other thing that the report showed was that there was quite a few people that referred to harassment and bullying as one of the reasons why they're actually fleeing this field, which is obviously heartbreaking to hear.

I hope and I believe.

But I hope that it's not so much in the way that it's not so much in then actual arbitrator scenario, as it is in the law firms, but obviously, we're not new to that, I realise I can't see where the questions are, I probably should have a window open that I don't Don't worry about that Lise I'll ask you the question.

OK, well, they would go perfect.

So the next one is how do we find the arbitrators?

So there are two aspects to this.

One is we find them and the other one is how do they then get selected?

Looking at finding it, we use databases to use our own.

We use external ones, we use network, we use general searches and so forth.

And then we have a number.

And what do we have our seven aspects that will look at when we actually select from that pool.

The thing with this is all of the ones that I just highlighted now are quite susceptible to bias and to unconscious bias.

Our own networks and external networks tend to tend to cluster the top names because that's that's where they start gathering.

So they're not great at diversity network, general searches, balance management skills, all of these are things that you can very easily colour with what your opinion of management skills and so forth is, which tends to sometimes have a male connotation to it.

And actually previous experience as an arbitrator is something that is hard for us to see because this is a closed world.

So we don't have transparency into that.

So that one is also kind of hard and it provides it with a beautiful catch 22 of fostering the ones that are already through the door, not helping anyone getting through that door.

And the nature and circumstance of some of these are factual, very easy, you need to understand Spanish or whatever it is some of them are 'This is complicated.

We should have a smart person here and maybe that is more him than her.' I don't know.

So some of there's a lot of these things that really, in all honesty, sets us up for quite a complex area here.

So kind of rounding up here, the the issues that we're looking at is that we have we have a lack of transparency in both the process and in the competencies.

So we can't really see where they've done what they've done and where they've been.

We do have a process that is quite sensitive to this.

We have a catch 22 for getting the first appointment.

You need to have an appointment that is for us to be able to appoint you as a chair you need to have a previous appointment.

And the previous appointment will be provided usually by you being appointed as a co arbitrator first, and then you can be a chair the next time.

But if we remember back, the people appointing the core arbitrators are the parties and they tend to appoint very few women, which means that we get few women through the door and look at that, then we have a lack of diversity for the parties generally don't care.

This is it's extremely harsh, but this is a rare occasion.

And the only thing that they care about is shit.

I've been sued.

We need to get out of this.

I need the best arbitrator around.

And the level the list of diversity doesn't really ring there because it's a one time offer they don't offer.

Sorry, it's a one time occurrence for them.

So it doesn't fall into their pool of, you know, where they apply a diversity filter.

You have a lack of a systemic approach from the law firms, and there are in all honesty, I would want to say do better.

They could do better.

And we only stand for 35 percent of the appointments, so we can only do so much.

So those are issues.

That being said, there's a lot being done, there's a equal representation in an arbitration package, we are looking at increased transparency a lot.

There's a lot of statistics coming out, reports like ours and so forth.

It's a lot of focus.

This is not the only webinar on this topic and hasn't been for the last five years, which is great.

And there's a tonne of different initiatives going on here, which means that I think we are somehow I want to end on a positive note.

I think we're really looking at some sort of a tipping point.

The numbers we're looking at here are aggregated from the ICA report.

So they take you from 1990 and up to 2019.

They are they are an aggregate of different.

The first numbers here, just ICA  and then we're kind of adding institutions as we go along.

And I think from 2015, you have a pretty broad base here, but you also see a very steep curve, admittedly, from painfully low numbers in 1990s.

But you're looking at you're looking at steep progress.

So when I say tipping point, I'm referring back to a book by Malcolm Gladwell that kind of looks at what are the what are the aspects that are needed for something to change small changes that mean make a big difference.

And he talks about three things that needs to be in place.

And I think we have them all.

And I think that's what we're seeing here.

He talks about the law of the few few people with specific type of people they can they are needed you need a salesperson.

You need a maverick, as he says.

You need to connect.

You need a certain kind of people to push out the information to actually make it stick.

And they need to make sure that the message is sticky enough.

And here I think that there has been a change in how we talk about these things as a thou shall do this to this is important and this is good for you.

And you have the pledge and you have statistics, which is a little less it's kind of hard not to show your statistics when you're being asked and that pushes things.

And then you need a change in context.

You need a catalysis Yeah, that's something that to kick start the change.

And I think we've had that, too, in both Me Too and the increased visibility that, for instance, the pledge which came about in 2015, which is you can see going up and one of the things it asked us for is all the institutions to be transparent about statistics.

And when it became that transparent, it's kind of hard to close your eyes to facts and numbers.

So I think that visibility combined with the Me Too has really provided for that changing context.

So I think we have all of these things and I think that's what we're looking at here.

So with that, I kind of want to I want to wrap up on that positive note.

I think when it comes to gender diversity, we are heading in a good direction and quite fast on the diversity aspects, maybe less so.

Thank you so much, Liz, that was fascinating and I'm sure we're going to talk about all the diversity aspects, there will be questions about that as well.

It's such an interesting study, is such a well researched study as well.

I very much like the way you presented it and your methodology.

You said Stockholm is a very big place for arbitration to some extent.

It's also revealing, although you have a very proactive policy.

So to a lesser extent, maybe it's not revealing.

I'd like to get back to the problem of the client, because this is fascinating.

This is shocking at the same time.

So I think everybody's understood.

So these clients, the sort of victim of the problem, they generally rely on a given law firm to find a lawyer.

And this lawyer is going to be appointed by them as an arbitrator, right?

Yep.

So you explain that in these big law firms, it's very difficult to become a partner with so many colleagues who are absolutely excellent lawyers, women lawyers in London, Paris, Singapore, Hong Kong, you name it.

You have plenty of them.

They're not necessarily yet partners.

But I agree with you.

I think it's common.

It's changing.

I've seen the change myself.

So the client, the relationship between the client, the law firm and you you said you have no no possible sort of influence or impact, but how do you see that potentially evolving?

Because these big companies, often they have diversity policies.

They have all sorts of gender equality policies.

So how come they do not realise now or implement this diversity sort of ambition?

Maybe it's hypocritical to their dispute settlement mechanism.

And I think that's really interesting.

And I so there's a there's a report that Rogier, which is a big Nordic law firm, does every other year is called the dispute resolution index, I believe.

And they ask they ask their clients and they ask the three hundred top biggest companies about various attitudes towards dispute resolution.

And in the last one, they had a special section on diversity.

And they asked the parties, how much do you care about how many of you care about diversity when it comes to arbitrating arbitrators?

And I think.

I can't remember the exact number now, but it was low, and the way I see it is when I.

I mean, if I just look at when I was in House counsel myself, you it was a lot going on in terms of pushing diversity for when you hire your partners and who you have on your team.

So and this is, what, five, 10 years ago and I think even 10 and longer years ago that this started becoming a thing.

When you start shopping around for law firms, you actually have diversity as an aspect to it.

But that is something that you buy often.

That is a relationship that you have often and that is a direct relationship that you have.

Whereas unless depending on what company you're in, hopefully you don't wind up in arbitration too often.

And the point, the step of appointing the arbitrator is also one step removed.

So you you will have done your homework and you will apply your diversity aspect when it comes to picking your your law firm and your partner.

And in all honesty, I think also there we have some way to work, but at least there's a there's an awareness there.

But I think it's just it's just it's too far away.

It's too far removed for you to care about that part as well.

Same as I would imagine this when they are looking at which experts should I be using for as an expert witness for what?

For X and so forth?

It's it's it's too far removed.

Yeah, that's what I think and hope.

I'm hoping it's not just plain ignorance, I suppose.

And that would be also very interesting to to study and it might have been done already.

I'm I'm not aware of that.

But, you know, you go if you step back and you start at the level of the law schools actually who exactly specialise in what.

So if you take international corporate affairs or international arbitration, you do not necessarily have that many women know that many ladies, girls who specialise in these disciplines.

So the problem, I suppose, is multifolded.

It also comes from the very studies these ladies will pursue and whether they choose this type of specialisation later when they join a law firm don't you think?

But that's actually an interesting one, because what we have seen is that for us, it's it's almost problematic that arbitration litigation becomes such of a specialised specialisation, because we when we appoint we need we realise a couple of years ago that we were actually it was harder for us to appoint people with labour law experience.

And there was a couple of other fields because people go so fast into litigation specialisation that that's their one field.

And we often need to appoint arbitrators that have a broader competence.

So that has a special competence.

That is something other, at least in addition to to arbitration.

So I'm not sure if that helps, but I can see because I can see the trend.

I just see that that trend is problematic for several reasons that are interesting.

And I think it's a very good takeaway for law schools actually to understand that hyper specialism doesn't work because you can't specialise in the procedure.

Basically, you have to specialise in certain fields.

Yeah.

And to some extent be a generalist as well, because low fields interrelate.

Exactly.

That's great.

So we have a few questions now from Claudia with the first question Clauida says not sure if I've missed this in the presentation, Sorry if I did, but there is a high percentage of women dropping out of the profession due to the stressful working environment, that's for sure.

In past research on the solicitor profession, we found the numbers were quite high.

What do you think about that?

Numbers dropping out is quite high?

I mean, I think it's honestly quite depressing.

I think it goes back to this many aspects to this, and I actually think quite a lot about our role as an institution in pushing this environment, because we also there's an extreme focus on time and efficiency and so forth.

And and the SCC has actually just released a new dispute resolution tool that will allow you to have a quick assessment of a case in three weeks, which will be a very intense, intense case.

And when we had results, I think it's a I think it's a brilliant product for many reasons.

But I step back and I look at it as I wonder if this is going to be another one, pushing pushing that this these issues.

I think there's a there's a fundamental issue with the business model of law firms.

And I know that maybe I am out on a limb talking about this when it comes to being charging by the hour.

The more hours, the more money.

So.

I definitely think that they have their best for the client in mind and that they wouldn't that they're not pushing hours to just push hours, but you don't have an incentive to to actually cap how much you work.

And it's I mean, it sets the expectations and nobody wants to be worse than the other.

And this was the same when I was an NMA that you never want to have the ball in your court.

It should never be you that are the issue.

The reason why whatever is happening isn't happening yet.

You always push it over as fast as you can.

And then the other one was the other.

One other thing, you push it over on Friday afternoon.

So at least I have, you know, Friday evening off before it comes back in my court again.

But then, of course, the poor sap on the other side gets it on Friday afternoon, just like we get all our emergency operations on Christmas Eve or a Friday afternoon.

But so, yeah, it is it's depressing.

It is and I'm going to say Claudia's question didn't come out of the blue.

We conducted together a series of confidential, so to speak, interviews with lawyers.

And they said that.

Yeah.

So it's a known fact.

It's not exactly a secret in the profession.

Yeah.

All right.

So another question from Jerry.

Thank you very much.

Selection.

I understand that the cases themselves may be confidential, but why do you feel that competencies should be considered confidential?

Could there be scope for competency framework rather than case related competencies that might breach confidentiality?

I think that is a really I think that's probably one of the good solutions and I think we are going that way.

So to begin with, obviously different institutions have taken different approaches when it comes to showing, for instance, who the arbitrators are.

SCC is being very transparent on this.

We haven't decided to go that route.

We might in the future, but we're not there.

The there are a number of different databases that are trying to achieve this, trying to achieve increased transparency in competencies that will allow them people to rise up faster.

And I got to say, I really applaud those initiatives.

So I think there's this three ones mainly that I know of.

You have used Mundie, that is that generates aggregates information, pulling it out of especially investment cases, which means that since they are the big ones and the heavy ones, they are also of extra male dominated.

But you will then have, you know, anybody who they can scrape essentially from the Internet.

They will they will list them.

And then you have G-Art and G-arbitration, data, arbitration, whatever the R stands for.

But it's a database which creates profiles for the arbitrators.

There's an issue with that one, though, I would say, and that is they do this manually, which I think is is really good.

But it also means that they're adding them quite slowly.

And that means that you're back to the tip of the iceberg problem, their database contains five hundred arbitrators globally right now, which means that that is the elite.

I mean, that's the way you start.

So that doesn't really help you get through the door.

And then you have another one called Arbitrated Intelligence that is also working on this.

That is also basing it on that.

You can rate them afterwards and they will create a profile based on the information that they get filtered from different ways to try and filter out.

If you were just, you know, begruntal because he lost or whatever it might be.

But they have also seen some of the similar issues.

And I've seen that there's various issues to that.

I still think that even though there are teething issues with all the of the databases out there today, this is what we need to do.

This is where we need to be going and this is where we will be going, because this is just the way the world this is organising its data bit by bit and this is coming.

So, yes, it's it's happening and it's a good thing.

Excellent.

It's very interesting because we talked mostly and correct me if I'm wrong, we talk mostly about commercial arbitration.

Yeah, it's slightly different, not very different, but slightly different for what we call investment arbitration.

And I'm thinking about the role of the state, in particular the states recommending, you know, certain appointments.

So I guess the states could also adopt certain diversity policies, if you agree with me.

Yeah, definitely.

And I think there's some anecdotal, completely anecdotal.

But a previous secretary general and my son was on a panel in.

I want to say Nigeria, I believe it was, and she asked as well why we see African countries fairly often on one side, but we don't see them necessarily pointing out and now I'm talking more about ethnic diversity.

We don't see them necessarily appointing arbitrators from Africa.

And it was met with just laughter.

And she was like, I don't I don't even know how to how to what what, what what am I supposed to interpret this laughter with?

And then no answer.

But I think that is there is an issue there, of course, as well that, yes, you need to you need to make sure also as a state and as a state, I think your responsibility is higher.

A lot higher.

Absolutely.

And again, you step back and you see who's competent in the field in your country sometimes, you know, not so many people.

So you have to look at your education system, your law schools, et cetera.

It's a long problem.

We're going to touch upon the other aspects of diversity.

And we have this interesting question from Ali.

Ali, I'm smiling because we joked about that with Lise at the beginning of the conversation.

So Ali says, I'm interested in the apparent assumption of age being equivalent to sell.

Is this fair often for someone to give a balanced opinion and judgement in particular situation as an arbitration arbitrator?

I would have thought years of experience as a measure is important rather than stating them as sell?

I still I completely agree.

I think that is maybe this is why they are as old as they are.

It's because you do need a lot of experience.

This is not what you do on your first year of of of a law firm.

This is what you do.

I mean, generally, our young arbitrators start after they made partner.

So this is this is senior and above.

The question, I suppose, is just how senior do need to be.

When we looked at this, the oldest person we had who got an appointment was 87.

That might be going beyond just experience, experience, and especially since often the cases can run for quite a few years.

And and you might actually have issues in the in what happens four years from now or five years from now.

So I come from the start up world, as I mentioned in the beginning.

And as I think I mentioned, I when I joined here and I realised that the youth organisation start at age 45 and I had barely worked with anybody older than 38.

To me, it's I think I completely agree with you, but I think we need to acknowledge the fact that our entire notion of what is young and what is old starts at 45, being just past, you know, adolescence, which is quite, quite old.

I mean, it's great because I have a lot of good years before I go grow old, but so absolutely not.

And I can also say there that, again, anecdotally, when we started with the FCC platform, which is a case management platform that we use, I thought the issues was going to be with our older users.

Turns out that quite often not, quite often, I was actually younger users because the a lot of the older users are or older arbitrators are very it's very important for them to be lean forward and adopt these kind of things because they would be worried about not being technically savvy and so forth.

So it's absolutely not not a it's not an issue to be old obviously.

It's more an issue if we start just repeat appointing the same person all over and over and over again, which is.

Well, I think what happens when you appoint somebody that is 88.

Right and you think it's also the question or the reason is that because arbitration is the sort of activity embraced by people when they retire.

So they have had experience as lawyers, as those as justices, judges they read and they are so after as arbitrator precisely because they experimented.

Yeah, no, definitely.

And I think I mean, we're we're not going to be we're not going to be having a cut age of 65 as our retirement ages at any point soon.

And I don't think we ever will have.

So you think using we would stay outside of the fact that it rhymes very well with male and pale?

It is more maybe to just highlight the fact of of where we have the notion of an arbitrator as an old grey man, white and grey man.

of course.

And that's the reality really, it's the reality.

This happens to a lot.

I mean, you could also see that the the the kind of median arbitrator is like 45.

So that is, you know, just out of adolescence.

Another question from Ali in the selection process, are the arbitrators anonymous?

Would this help with ensuring quality and ensuring highest quality and experience with the required rule?

So an anonymous CVS, for example?

Yeah, I've been thinking around that, just as you've done with it.

Like when you when you apply for a job to join an orchestra and so forth who play behind a screen, that would be amazing.

I don't think it would work.

Unfortunately, this is such a small pool that even if I strip the name of and I put a CV in front of any of my colleagues, they're going to be able to pinpoint exactly who it is.

So I don't think anonymous exists here.

And the other thing is we need to make sure that they are not conflicted.

Obviously, you could do that in a later stage, but you don't want to wind up with this person looks great but the reason for that is because he works at the one of the parties or something like that.

But the main problem, I think, is we know them all.

Yeah, yeah.

There's a lot of reputation its a small field in a way.

So, yeah, we haven't touched upon the more the other aspects of diversity.

So ethnicity.

Do you want to say a few words about that?

Are you, are you working or not with the chamber?

Yes, we're working not as much as we've done on gender.

And I think one of the reasons is that it's harder for us to pinpoint since we don't track ethnicity, I can't select for it.

And in this is also an area where Sweden is it's not uncomplicated in Sweden to actually define someone as a certain ethnicity.

I know that if you go to the U.S., it's quite common that you would state that I am Caucasian or I am, you know, whatever it might be.

If somebody had asked that in Sweden, we would have been shocked and appalled.

I would never, ever be asked to state that, which means that we have to kind of work first with our own blind spots of, oh, how do we even work with this matter?

So that's one thing that I think has held us back as an institution.

The other thing is, since we don't have it available and we don't have statistics on it, it's harder to work with and find and it's harder to to to look at.

And it hasn't been as much on the agenda when we look at I didn't show you now where they come from, but almost all of our arbitrators come from the northern hemisphere.

That aligns quite well with where generally our parties come from.

So there's some sort of alignment there.

But there has been a lot of initiatives like there's African-American descent and also our African descent list of arbitrators, for instance, that we look at every now and then.

We course are working together with a couple of other Chamber of Commerce is based out of, for instance, Cote d'Ivoire and so forth to see if we can expand our knowledge and network there.

And we've been going down to, you know, to participate in the arbitral community in various African countries to try and and increase that focus.

I think that probably represents the biggest blind spot for us.

The other are the non Caucasian ethnicities we have much more focus on already.

Well, thank you very much, Lise.

As we said, it's a very complex problem which starts from, you know, training to career ambitions, et cetera, and achieving.

Well, there was fascinating Lise, thank you so much for this great presentation.

Extremely well researched, extremely clear, very, very interesting and great questions.

So I'd like to thank you one more time.

Thanks also for being such a great audience and all my colleagues for the support in particular, Claudia, He, Gloria, Barnaby and Olga.

.

So I'll see you very soon.

Next week for another webinar, this webinar is recorded is going to be on the website of the university and I think some of it is going to become a podcast and maybe for your previous employer I would love that.

And I also want to say thank you and for great questions.

This is always a topic that is really interesting to discuss.

Thank you, Lise.

Thank you, everyone.

Thank you.