How to Select an Arbitrator: What the Résumé Doesn't Tell You

Arbitrator selection is the highest-leverage decision in the case.

Most parties treat it as a credentials exercise.

It is not.

The standard due diligence is well understood. Experience in the relevant field. Publications. Prior appointments. Institutional reputation. Conflicts check. All of it matters. None of it answers the question that actually determines the outcome.

The question is not whether this arbitrator understands international arbitration.

It is how this arbitrator is likely to think about your case.

Those are different inquiries.

The first can be answered from a CV. The second requires something harder: an analysis of how the arbitrator has actually reasoned in cases that resemble yours — not just what they decided, but why, and what that pattern suggests about how they will approach the specific issues at the center of your dispute.

Does this arbitrator decide narrowly or broadly? Are they persuaded by commercial logic or doctrinal precision? How do they treat expert witnesses — do they engage with the methodology or defer to the conclusion? Do they push toward settlement, or do they let the case run to the award? How do they manage a hearing? How do they write?

None of this appears on a résumé.

Award analysis is the most reliable tool available. A careful reading of an arbitrator's published awards — not for outcomes, but for reasoning — reveals the intellectual tendencies that will shape how they approach your case. The questions they ask. The arguments they find compelling. The gaps they notice. The damages methodologies they accept or reject.

But awards are not the whole picture.

Procedural temperament matters too. How does this arbitrator run a hearing? Do they intervene, or do they listen? Are they patient with witnesses, or do they cut cross-examination short? Do they ask questions that reveal where they are, or do they keep their thinking opaque until the award?

And there are the soft factors that experienced practitioners know but rarely write down. How does this arbitrator interact with counsel? Do they follow the chair, or do they think independently? Are they susceptible to a particular style of advocacy? Do they have a known position on an issue that is central to your case?

The difficulty is that gathering this intelligence requires time, access, and a certain kind of experience — the kind that comes from having observed many arbitrators across many cases, not just having appeared before a few.

There is also a structural problem.

Counsel who practice regularly in international arbitration have ongoing relationships with the arbitrators they appear before. Those relationships are professional assets. They are also constraints on candor. It is difficult to give a client a fully frank assessment of an arbitrator's weaknesses when you expect to appear before that arbitrator again next year.

An independent advisor has no such constraint.

The goal of arbitrator selection is not to find the most distinguished name on the list.

It is to find the arbitrator most likely to understand and be persuaded by your case — and least likely to be persuaded by theirs.

That is a judgment call. It requires knowing both the arbitrator and the case well enough to see the fit.

By the time parties discover they got it wrong, the tribunal has already been constituted.