Failure-mode testing
The clause simulated against default, delay and urgency scenarios — drafted for the dispute, not for the signing ceremony.
Arbitration clause review
One paragraph in the contract decides where every fight happens.
Arbitration clause drafting and review by Aun & Co.: scope, seat, rules, language and appointment mechanics, stress-tested before the contract is signed.
The arbitration clause is negotiated last, at midnight, by tired people — and it governs everything if the deal fails. A pathological clause produces a year of jurisdictional warfare before the merits begin; a clean one produces a tribunal in weeks. The firm reviews and drafts these clauses as a disputes practice, not a corporate afterthought: every element — scope, seat, rules, language, appointment, interim relief, confidentiality — is tested against the fight it will one day have to host.
The work spans
- Pre-signature review of arbitration clauses in commercial contracts
- Drafting: scope, seat, institutional rules, language, tribunal size
- Multi-tier clauses: negotiation and mediation steps that do not trap
- Carve-outs for urgent court relief alongside arbitration
- Audit of arbitration clauses across an existing contract portfolio
- A major contract is at final draft and the dispute clause is the template nobody read.
- Your counterparty proposed arbitration in a seat and institution you know nothing about.
- Your standard contracts carry a decade-old clause and no one recalls who wrote it.
- You need arbitration for the merits but courts kept available for urgent freezing relief.
The clause is read by simulating its failure: this counterparty defaults, that party stalls the nomination, assets need freezing on a weekend — does the paragraph hold. The firm drafts against the known pathologies: undefined scope, mismatched seat and governing law, appointment mechanisms with no default, tiers that become limitation traps. The output is a clause a tribunal can be built from without a single court application.
04 · What you get
Seat-law coherence
Seat, governing law and language aligned so no gap between them becomes a jurisdictional argument later.
Portfolio consistency
One reviewed standard across your contracts, ending the lottery of whichever template a given deal happened to inherit.
The firm has acted where a client's cross-border agreements carried inherited clauses naming a defunct appointing body and no fallback. The engagement replaced the standard across the portfolio and prioritised amendment of the live contracts with the highest dispute probability.
Described in abbreviated, anonymised form to preserve client confidentiality.
What makes an arbitration clause unenforceable or pathological?
Ambiguity at the load-bearing points: naming a non-existent institution, contradicting the seat and governing law, appointment mechanisms with no default, or scope language that leaves half the disputes outside. Each is a year of litigation compressed into a typo.
Should the arbitration seat match the governing law of the contract?
Not necessarily, but the combination must be deliberate. Seat law governs the arbitration's validity and challenges; governing law rules the merits. A mismatch is workable when chosen — and expensive when accidental.
Can we keep access to courts for urgent measures alongside arbitration?
Yes, and you should say so expressly. A standard carve-out preserves court jurisdiction for interim and conservatory relief without undermining the agreement to arbitrate — the drafting cost is one sentence; the omission's cost is an asset that moved.