Partner Gary Born visited Costa Rica to participate in a conference on “Innovation, Technology, and Law”, hosted by HDuarte Legal and the Centro Internacional de Conciliación y Arbitraje (CICA) of the Cámara Costarricense-Norteamericana de Comercio. His interview during the conference was published in the eighth edition of the Revista Costarricense de Derecho Internacional.

Excerpt: Technology has always played a role in international arbitration. It played a role in the earliest records of arbitration, three thousand years before Christ, in what is currently Iraq, when arbitration awards were recorded on cuneiform tablets. We might not think that is very advanced technology today, but the development of writing was in that era a technological development, and, unsurprisingly, it played a role in arbitration by enabling what the arbitrators decided to be written down in a final way, recorded, and ultimately enforced. This contributed to the rule of law.

Today, technology plays a very different role. It has evolved even in the last fifty years, not to say the last five thousand years, since cuneiform tablets. Fifty years ago, when the New York Convention first began to take hold, international arbitration still used what was then contemporary technology. Documents were typewritten and digitized the way they are today. They were not even sent by courier, they were sent by ship. The idea of technology, such as hyperlinks and the like, during this time, wasn’t even something you would imagine. Very traditional technologies were used, although much more advanced, of course, than the ones used three thousand years before Christ. These were, however, by today’s standards, quite undeveloped. Today, although one can say that technology will evolve more in the future, arbitration uses this technological tools in a way that, even fifty years ago, I don’t think practitioners would have imagined. 

Download the publication to read the full interview, starting on page 97.