Efficient Management of Transnational Disputes: Mutual Gain by Mediation or Joint Loss in Litigation

摘要

Companies spend billions in disputes with other companies and governments. Such litigation has become ever more costly as modern commercial arbitration consumes high-cost services from specialised lawyers. What is more, the years of increasingly antagonistic litigation produce lose-lose results for everybody concerned. Many more billions of value in terms of valuable relationships, established at great expense and risk, are destroyed. There is at present no systematic analysis or competence of managing transnational disputes as the problem falls into a no-man's land between the disciplines of law, international management, economics and applied psychology. Essentially, managers when faced with disputes often give up and just pass them on to corporate lawyers who pass them on to specialised international law firms who pass them on to the very narrow club of international arbitrators. The sense of business, of commercial efficiency, of proactive rather than reactive assault on managerial challenges, gets lost on the way: managers simply give up. The lawyers run away with such disputes into their own playing fields.