News date: 27 January 2023
On 26 January 2023, Roman Protsyshyn, Advocate, Counsel at Ilyashev & Partners Law Firm, spoke at a webinar organised by a Ukrainian information and legal system LIGA:ZAKON, with the report titled “Let’s Save on Arbitration: Experience of Clients’ “Expensive” Mistakes”.
Roman Protsyshyn shared his experience of representing clients in international commercial arbitrations, focusing on typical mistakes made by the parties to a contract. Roman drew attention to the most common way of entering into an arbitration agreement in the form of an arbitration clause. He stressed that the arbitration clause contained in the contract is not wholly independent of the contract.
“The arbitration clause is a part of a document called an agreement, and therefore, whether an arbitration agreement is entered into in the form of an arbitration clause is to be decided, first of all, by the usual analysis of the conclusion of the underlying agreement containing the arbitration clause, – pointed out Roman. – If we have a contract containing an arbitration clause and there are doubts about whether the contract was entered into at all, it is necessary to analyse the agreement. It must be found whether it is possible to conclude that even if the agreement is not entered into, the parties still have entered into an arbitration agreement”.
If the clients do not want to be bound by a contract, one of the methods to resolve such a problem may be filing a claim to a competent national court on the grounds that an agreement is not concluded, and an arbitration clause contained in it is also not concluded.
Roman also spoke about defects of an arbitration clause, non-arbitrable disputes and the work of ad hoc arbitration in Ukraine.
More than 400 entrepreneurs attended the webinar.
LIGA:ZAKON is a Ukrainian information and legal system containing a full range of the principal regulatory documents of Ukraine and legislative novelties. The platform is designed to support the business by developing information and analytical IT tools for business and public sector professionals. The platform cooperates with and is used by about 360,000 specialists, including almost all executive and judicial authorities.