Increased risk and disruption in the market have brought the threat of disputes into focus for global businesses, posing a major test for their legal teams and internal disputes procedures.

As dispute resolution experts, clients come to us when things have gone wrong, business relationships have been damaged, and there is no obvious solution.

Our expertise

Stewarts has considerable experience working with clients to identify potential risks, develop protocols and devise strategies to help them manage risk. This provides clients with early, pragmatic advice to prevent disputes from arising.

Our dispute avoidance service provides clients with advice on the following key issues:

• Stress-testing contracts: as disputes experts, our role is not to create contracts but to challenge or defend them. This makes us ideally placed to stress-test contracts, including key contractual clauses relating to risk allocation, warranty terms and indemnities. If we identify areas of vulnerability, we provide our clients with optimised revised wording to protect their interests.
• Evaluating internal document management systems: disclosure is the process by which a party to a dispute makes available to the other party documents relevant to the issues in dispute. A large disclosure exercise can significantly impact the costs a party incurs in pursuing or defending a dispute. It can also disrupt the business and take up a substantial amount of our clients’ project management and IT stakeholders’ time. As disputes specialists, we help clients keep disclosure costs down by evaluating internal document management systems to identify potential gaps or risks before a dispute arises. This includes reviewing data maps, identifying subject-matter experts, analysing preservation and contingency plans and auditing clients’ preparedness for electronic disclosure.
• Drafting arbitration and disputes clauses: as arbitration experts, we know what makes a good (and bad) arbitration and disputes clause. Poorly drafted arbitration agreements and disputes clauses can lead to expensive or overly complex procedures and difficulties successfully or swiftly enforcing outcomes. We assist clients with drafting arbitration agreements and disputes clauses or identifying gaps or issues in existing agreements to provide clients with certainty.
• Tailored training programmes: we offer clients regular training with a view to preventing disputes from arising. Our training is tailored to meet the specific issues businesses and jurisdictions face and covers topics such as drafting tips for contractual clauses and preservation and management of documents.
• Advice on overseas investments: our team has experience arbitrating in jurisdictions around the world, including in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East, and offers advice on business issues connected to overseas investments. This includes public international law advice in relation to investment treaties, choice of law or seat clauses and areas of risk in commercial cross-border contracts and agreements.

Every client has different needs and priorities in terms of potential risks affecting them. We would be happy to explore with you how we can assist in identifying and minimising the dispute risks faced by your business.

Please contact a member of the International Arbitration team to learn more about our dispute avoidance and readiness offering.