Intuitu Personae Character of Arbitration’s Mandate and Use of Legal Assistants in International Arbitrations

Use of legal assistants in international arbitrations, especially in important and complex cases, has become a common practice to the extent that arbitrators or arbitral tribunals carry out a great number of procedural or substantive matters having the help of their legal assistants who are normally chosen from young lawyers or interns. No doubt benefiting from services of assistants will bring different advantages in time, costs and efficiency of arbitration process and allow arbitrators to devote most of their time to the case scrutinizing different aspects of the case, and in turn, delegate matters such as organizing evidence and documents, coordinating the hearings, summarizing the parties’ pleadings etc. to their assistants. In spite of this, the question has been raised recently that whether delegating arbitral tasks to assistants is against the intuitu personae character of the arbitrators’ mandate since the parties have appointed arbitrators due to their personal characteristics and by accepting their mandate, they are expected to carry out their duty in person. The concern becomes greater when one faces delegation to the assistants of substantive issues, such as researching legal sources and relevant jurisprudence, summarizing parties’ memorials, attending deliberations, and drafting certain parts of the award. The present article will discuss the conflict between intuitu personae character of arbitrators’ mandate and benefiting from arbitral assistants’ services in international arbitrations. To that end, rules of arbitral institutions, legal doctrines and jurisprudence have been examined and finally, the standard for judging the violation of intuitu personae character of arbitrators’ mandate will be introduced.