Experiencing Arbitration

This coursebook facilitates "practice ready" students who are ready to represent parties in U.S. domestic arbitrations. It covers the full scope of the role of arbitration counsel in advising clients, including drafting arbitration clauses, prosecuting and defending court actions at the enforcement stage, and day-to-day ethical problems.

The book teaches transferable skills that are vital for the success of any junior practitioner. On the transactional side, it provides opportunities to practice client counseling, drafting, and contract negotiations. On the litigation side, it provides opportunities to engage in the drafting of documents that are less frequently included in the law school curriculum but are vital to the practice of law. These documents include requests for the production of documents, requests for the production of electronic documents, motions for emergency relief, as well as dispositive motions and affidavits.

By teaching transferable skills, the book serves as an engaging platform for introducing students to the skills they will need to perform well on the Multistate Performance Test as part of their bar examination. The Multistate Performance Tests asks students to draft a specific piece of work product based on a closed packet of materials. The chapters are set up in such a way that students will be exposed to that way of encountering new kinds of work product and dealing with such work product on the basis of a closed packet of materials. This experience thus also has significant bar study benefits.

The book employs simulations presenting real-world practice problems. Though many of these problems are discrete, the latter chapters of the book run a single simulation through an entire arbitration process in order to show students that procedural choices made in the beginning of an arbitration have significant implications for later stages of proceedings. This flexible use of the simulation method introduces students to the need to address some discrete problems for clients while also alerting them to the fact that client advice can have a long half-life.

The authors are seasoned arbitration practitioners and academics. Collectively, they have served as arbitration counsel in more than a hundred disputes and authored over 60 articles.

Though flexible in how it can be used, the book is specially designed for use in arbitration skills classes. It can support clinical students who need to learn the basics of arbitration; and it can further support arbitration seminars.