The Year Ahead for Arbitrator Intelligence

Dear Friends of Arbitrator Intelligence,

2019 promises to be our most exciting year yet! This year, Arbitrator Intelligence will transition from a grassroots start-up entity to an innovative legal tech company that transforms how international arbitrators are selected.

Before explaining what 2019 holds, it is worth taking stock of what we have accomplished by the close of last year. Throughout 2017 and 2018, we collected responses to the Arbitrator Intelligence Questionnaire (or AIQ) from over 500 international commercial and investment arbitrations around the world. As a result, we now have significant data about case outcomes and arbitrators' decisional histories.

In 2018, Arbitrator Intelligence was presented globally at innumerable conferences and in-house presentations, and discussed in multiple law review articles, arbitration list-serves, and blogs. Much of this activity was part of our first, highly successful Outreach Campaign in Latin America.

For the campaign, we recruited 30 truly exceptional Latin American Ambassadors who did an amazing job of raising awareness and generating AIQs from that region. Our Latin American Campaign also created a model for future campaigns in other regions around the world, which will be coming in 2019. These and other details are available on our newly designed website.

Our next step—and our biggest challenge for 2019—is to transform this data into user-friendly reports on individual arbitrators and make those reports available to the international arbitration community.

These Arbitrator Intelligence Reports (AI Reports) will present state-of-the-art data analytics on topics that users currently gather through ad hoc, person-to-person inquiries. These topics include duration of arbitrations, rulings on jurisdiction and interim relief, grants or denials of requested document production, decisions on allocation of costs, and assessments of legal methodologies.

Over the past several months, we have been developing the content for AI Reports. We will soon be announcing the roll out of our first prototype AI Report (based on mock data) and then subsequently our first sample reports profiling actual arbitrators. At that point, we will be seeking feedback from you to refine their content before they are finally available for sale later in 2019.

When they are available, AI Reports will enable arbitrator selection to move beyond intuition and anecdote. They will facilitate instead the use of analytics based on systematically collected, aggregated data. The result will be greater predictability for users and a market for arbitrator services that better serves the international arbitration community.

Despite these exciting changes, Arbitrator Intelligence will remain an academically affiliated, non-profit entity committed to our Mission of promoting transparency, accountability, and diversity in international arbitration. In keeping with these aims, we believe AI Reports will help newer and smaller parties access this critical information that has been otherwise unavailable. They will also create the conditions for increased diversity by making the track records of newer and more diverse arbitrators accessible to users.

Thank you all for your support in 2018, watch for our new AI Reports in 2019, and keep those AIQs coming in!.

Best regards,

Catherine A. Rogers

Founder and President