by Donna Ross*   Good drafting makes for good contracts and good business relationships. Yet these principles are often forgotten when it comes to drafting dispute resolution clauses. They are often an afterthought and an inopportune one at that, as once the rest of the contract has been agreed, the parties prefer celebration to discussing what might go wrong. For this reason, the champagne clause, sometimes called an eleventh hour or midnight clause,  is more often than not unclear, incomplete or [...]

While the property markets and other parts of the economy may be slowing, a little-noticed sector has been quietly roaring­. Indigenous-owned business is booming and the ADC has launched a new national ADR body, the First Nations’ Mediation Panel, to support and take advantage of what looks to be a game changer in indigenous enterprise. A 2018 report released by the indigenous consulting arm of Price Waterhouse Coopers found indigenous-owned business contributed up to $6.6 billion to the Australian economy [...]

Imagine a hearing room full of high-definition monitors replacing the millions of paper folders involved in your arbitration. From small, local to large-scale, international arbitrations, innovative electronic arbitration (eArbitration) technology allows you to go paperless. By transforming how your legal team works you can make arbitral processes easier, quicker, and more cost-effective. International collaboration The major benefits of eArbitrations lie in their collaborative potential; they enable collaboration between legal teams, experts, and clients in highly scalable and customisable cloud-based workspaces. [...]

Greg Rooney by Greg Rooney*   Mediation has an identity issue - but it’s not its fault. Mediators - and the profession they practise called mediation - merely sit as innocent bystanders observing how the modern collaborative interconnected economy has challenged the identity and, in some cases, the very existence of the established professions and commercial and social institutions. We now live in a time where a world of connectivity and fluidity has replaced the 20th- century [...]

By Lena Lindinger*   With the Australian Law Reform Commission expected to publish a discussion paper on third party funding in litigation, we want to take a look at where third party funding in international arbitration stands today in Australia and the rest of the world. Third Party Funding in International Arbitration Third Party Funding (TPF) arises when investors finance a legal claim in exchange for influence over case management and a part in the damages recoverable from the case.1 [...]

By Tony Song* Tony Song In every minute, over 12,986,111 texts messages are sent around the world.1 Each day, there is an output of over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data.2 By 2020, for every person on earth, 1.7 MB of data will be created per second. Data is today’s most valuable currency – it is borderless, vast and multi-purposive. With the ever-increasing ubiquity of smartphones, laptops and cloud computing, data is also more portable than ever. The natural [...]