What are the key advantages of Arbitration?

Cost

It may appear to be cheaper to run your matter in the Courts, however, experienced litigants and their advisers will tell you that the real cost of litigation is delay.
Delay costs the parties in:
- Lost business opportunities. Your competitors and customers do not stop whilst you resolve your dispute. Unless you are able to fully conduct business and exploit your intellectual property you lose.
- Additional legal fees. Typically, legal fees expand to meet the available time frame allocated by the Courts.
- Additional internal management costs to conduct the litigation. This is an often overlooked by disputing parties and can far outweigh the legal costs of any dispute.
With arbitration you can ensure that your dispute is always “ready to go” as required and not subject to the large Court backlog.
Depending on your choice of Court for complicated matters it can be 12 to 24 months before your matter is heard and then for complicated matters a further six months for a decision is not unreasonable.
Our Mr White can, depending on how fast you can prepare your case, issue a final and binding award in 6 to 9 months.
His reported time frame for writing substantial final judgments is less than 5 weeks from the conclusion of the hearing with minimal appeal opportunities.
To do so our Mr White makes extensive use of correspondence between the parties, written submissions and occasional telephone conferences as well as conducting many legal processes simultaneously (were possible).

Arbitration is confidential.
Arbitration therefore assists in preventing:
- your customers “googling” the full details of your dispute.
- your customers not placing orders whilst you are in dispute.
- your partners and suppliers ceasing to do business with you whilst you are in dispute.
- your customers, suppliers and business partners forming an incorrect and inappropriate view of your personnel, goods and services based on one bad and isolated dispute.

Expertise and control. You can select, by agreement, an arbitrator who is skilled in the relevant area of law and technology.
Judges have to be skilled in a whole range of disputes including crime, family, wills and other areas of law but may not have specialist technical expertise in the dispute subject matter.

The Courts are, correctly, very keen to ensure that public resources are not spent on private disputes.
Further, since Aon Risk Services Australia Limited v Australian National University¹⁾ list management practices may in some circumstances operate to the substantial detriment of the parties.

You can tailor your dispute resolution process based on the issues involved and the size and complexity of the dispute.

You can enforce arbitral awards internationally.
Courts judgments are often not enforceable internationally in which case often the whole litigation process must be commenced again in each jurisdiction.

¹⁾ [2009] HCA 27