What Eighteen Weeks in Arbitration Research Taught Me
Arbitration has a reputation for being dry. After eighteen weeks of research across more than twenty-five projects at Dewan & Dewan Law Chambers, I would say that reputation is partly earned and mostly wrong.
- Arbitration research means reading the same legal problem through multiple procedural frameworks simultaneously — ICC, SIAC, and domestic law at once.
- Kompetenz-kompetenz is not an abstract doctrine. In a live jurisdictional challenge, it determines whether the proceeding continues at all.
- The most interesting legal work sits in the gap between optimistic contract drafting and the dispute that follows when a relationship breaks down.
The dry part is real. Enforcement matrices, jurisdictional timelines, seat versus venue distinctions that turn on a single clause. But underneath the procedure is a set of genuinely interesting questions about what parties actually agreed to, and what happens when that agreement meets a dispute neither side anticipated.
What I actually did
Most of my work involved research memoranda on arbitration clauses, jurisdictional challenges, and the enforceability of awards under the New York Convention. I also worked on comparative analysis between Indian arbitration law and institutional frameworks like the ICC and SIAC, which meant reading the same underlying problem through two or three different procedural lenses at once.
The investor-state work was a separate register entirely. The stakes, the parties, and the applicable law are all different. The research skills transfer, but the instincts need recalibrating.
The thing that stayed with me
Kompetenz-kompetenz, the principle that a tribunal can rule on its own jurisdiction, sounds technical until you are reading a jurisdictional challenge where one party is arguing the entire arbitration agreement is void. At that point, it is not a doctrine. It is the question of whether this proceeding continues at all.
That is the kind of problem that makes arbitration interesting. The procedure is in service of a genuinely contested question, and the research shapes how that question gets answered.
What it changed
I came into the internship interested in corporate law broadly. I left with a much more specific interest in dispute resolution as it intersects with transactional practice. The moment when a contract that was drafted optimistically meets a relationship that has broken down is where a lot of the most interesting legal work lives. That gap is worth paying attention to.