Dear Members,
An eventful year for the DIS is reaching its end and the last twelve months have been challenging in many ways but also very rewarding.
We are grateful for the very positive feedback we have received concerning both the numerous activities initiated over the last months as well as the selection of a new secretary general. The initiation of bilateral groups fostering the exchange between arbitration communities and institutions in other countries has further developed, the first groups are about to start working. Also, the Court of Arbitration for Sport has been moved more in the focus: revised rules are about to be launched soon. Reports about many other of those activities can be found in this newsletter.
In addition to those initiatives which are directly visible to all members, a considerable amount of work and restructuring occurred behind the scenes. Inter alia there has been a streamlining of many internal processes and we are working on digitizing many of them. With the help of colleagues from Baker & McKenzie we kept our compliance system up to date, in particular as far as the sanctions against Russian entities and individuals were concerned. In that regard we have also continued our activities with our partner institutions in Austria, Italy, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland to ensure that these sanctions do neither prevent a proper administration of justice in the form of arbitral proceedings nor the enforcement of arbitral awards.
We are very grateful to the team at the DIS Secretariat. They ensured that all these challenges, changes and new initiatives did not negatively affect the high quality of the administration of the cases and that all events were well organized. That has required an extraordinary effort by many of the team members for which we would like to express our heartfelt thanks.
There are still a number of major items on our immediate agenda for the remainder of the year and the first part of next year. One concerns our members from the IHK organization including the DIHK with whom we hope to recalibrate our relationship. The second relates to implementing a cloud-based electronic platform for the conduct of arbitral proceedings. The Board has signed a contract with HighQ for the management of case files and is presently in the process of customizing it for DIS proceedings. In the future, this solution will also allow arbitrators and parties to directly upload pleadings and exhibits and to review case files online and download them. A third issue high on our agenda is the strengthening of other forms of ADR including mediation as well as our new sport arbitration rules.
We will keep you informed about all our future activities! Jointly with our new Secretary General Dr. Ramona Schardt we are looking forward to working with you in strengthening the position of the DIS as the leading provider of dispute resolution services as well as Germany as a place for dispute resolution in the next year.
Stefan Kröll, Rouven Bodenheimer, Reinmar Wolff