Arbitration made fair, simple and efficient

Arbitration is increasingly criticised for having become too inflexible, inefficient and “over-lawyered.”

Why not bring arbitration back to its roots? This is the idea behind COIA. We enable parties in a commercial dispute to receive fair and commercially sound solutions, while saving them time and money.

One of the arbitration approaches we encourage parties to use is ex aequo et bono. This form of decision-making traces its roots to Roman law and in the commercial law used throughout the middle-ages, but it has been continually developed since then. Today, it is part of modern public international law and is also expressly provided for in the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration. Ex aequo et bono arbitration allows the arbitrator to decide on the basis of general considerations of justice and fairness without reference to any particular national or international legal system. This avoids time-consuming and costly legal technicalities and the prejudice that might arise to at least one party from the application of a particular national law.

To avoid any misunderstanding: ex aequo et bono means arbitration, not arbitrary. The arbitrator applies the wording and intent of the parties’ contract to reach a decision, save those exceptional circumstances where equity and fairness require otherwise. In these special cases, most national laws would also likely invalidate such a contractual provision.