It is a privilege for us to announce the upcoming International Arbitration Conference which will take place on September 9-11, 2012 at The Biltmore Hotel, Coral Gables, FLORIDA, USA.

This high profile Conference is an initiative of the International Centre for Dispute Resolution^® (ICDR), ICDR Young & International (Y & I), and the International Bar Association (IBA).

This Conference will address international arbitration most popular topics and sessions of the last decade.

Those sessions will include:

• ICDR Young & International Tertulias: Popular round table discussions about international arbitration.
• The Strategy and Role of the Corporate Counsel in International Dispute Resolution.
• Investor/State Arbitration in the Americas.
• Two Rapid-Fire Discussions: Dispute Resolution Tour of North America and Dispute Resolution Tour of Latin America.

This Conference will also certainly be an opportunity for the ICDR to share its views and position on certain hot current issues concerning the ethics of international arbitration: obligations of disclosure of conflicts of interest by arbitrators, obligations of independence and impartiality of arbitrators...

The ICDR will certainly be asked by some of the participants if it shares the common sense view that no Attorney could sit as an ICDR arbitrator, let alone as an ICDR sole arbitrator, in a case while his law firm keeps counseling and entertaining business relations with one of the parties to the arbitration, without prior disclosure and acceptance by the other parties to the arbitration.

It could also provide a unique opportunity to question the ICDR on what it would do, as a prestigious international arbitration institution, if confronted to such a configuration.

Indeed, everyone has in mind a current high profile case in which an American arbitral institution has been confronted with an egregious conflict of interest involving a huge Canadian law firm. The arbitrator has resigned, but the arbitral institution had refused before his resignation to dismiss him and to challenge the conflicted partial award the Arbitrator had rendered while his major law firm was completing a 600 millions USD deal with one of the parties, the other party being unaware of such a huge transaction. Hopefully, the upcoming seminar will be an occasion for the ICDR to outline how it would have handled such a case.

For more information, please contact: Mr Jason CABRERA: CabreraJ@adr.org or “International Centre for Dispute Resolution”: websitemail@adr.org