José Astigarraga hosts Jason File, Director of Legal Affairs and General Counsel at the United States Council for International Business (USCIB), to discuss global arbitration trends, the future of international arbitration, and AI's impact on the field. They go on to explore Jason’s role at the USCIB, his career trajectory, and the distinctions in advocacy before international criminal, civil, and common law tribunals.

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Transcript:

Intro: Hello and welcome to Arbitral Insights, a podcast series brought to you by our International Arbitration Practice lawyers here at Reed Smith. I'm Peter Rosher, Global Head of Reed Smith's International Arbitration Practice. I hope you enjoy the industry commentary, insights and anecdotes we share with you in the course of this series, wherever in the world you are. If you have any questions about any of the topics discussed, please do contact our speakers. And with that, let's get started. 

José: Well, welcome, everyone. I am José Astigarraga , and I'm delighted to share this program with you. Very, very pleased to tell you that today we have Jason File, who, as I have the pleasure of sharing with you, is the new general counsel and representative of the USCIB in the United States. And I think we're going to have a really, really interesting conversation with Jason today. Let me tell you a little bit about Jason. He is currently the director of legal affairs for the U.S. Council for International Business in New York. He's a licensed attorney, has a very interesting background. He's licensed in New York, District of Columbia, England, and Wales as well. He's a graduate of Yale University as well as the University of Oxford and Yale Law School and is bilingual. He speaks English and French. He's had a very interesting career. Jason worked as a trial attorney in public and private international law since about 2005, and he began his career with WilmerHale, of course, the top of the top firms in international commercial and investor state arbitrations in a very wide range of cases that he had. Then as well, he worked with Cooley Firm in New York, again, working international commercial arbitrations in investor state, and as well did some court litigation related to the federal arbitration and the New York Convention. And I'll call it arbitration-related litigation. One very, very interesting aspect of Jason's career that I hope we'll have a chance to discuss is that he served as a war crimes prosecutor at a United Nations International Criminal Tribunal, and we'll hear about that. To top it off as well, Jason has taught international law in Europe and has spoken all over the world. So, Jason, welcome. I'm just so pleased that you've made time for us to be able to speak. Perhaps the most logical place to start might be to ask you about, can you tell us about your new position? 

Jason: Absolutely. And thank you, José, for inviting me to be a guest on this. And thanks to Reed Smith for hosting. I think it's a great program that you guys have. Getting the word out about arbitration across the world and in the United States is one of the main focuses actually of my new position. I've been in the job now for about four months, Director of Legal Affairs. We have USCIB is a wide ranging business organization that represents the interests interests of our members in many different international organizations, UN, OECD, IOE, and the ICC. And one of our many components of certain policy areas and issue areas is arbitration. We serve as the U.S. National Committee for Arbitration at the ICC. We constitute and we lead the U.S. delegation to the ICC Commission on Arbitration and ADR. We have a nominations Nations Commission, which responds to requests from the Secretariat of the ICC when there is a need for an institutional appointment for arbitrators in pending ICC cases. They come to us with requests to end arbitrators in cases where there's a connection to the U.S. They're either looking for a U.S. National arbitrator or a U.S.-based arbitrator. We also intervene as as amicus curiae in pending litigation in the United States when there is an important arbitration-related issue, often related to either the Federal Arbitration Act or the New York Convention. Sometimes it's about evidence and discovery, those sorts of things. So it's a really fantastic opportunity that I've just started to enjoy, especially in terms of getting a little bit out of the trenches of litigation and arbitration, which is what I was doing for many years, and to have more of a kind of overview opportunity to be able to interact in a thought leadership way and a professional relations way with many of the practitioners in our field. And so it's been a really rewarding few months and I can't wait to continue in it over the coming months and years. 

José: I did not realize the whole range of activities of the USCIB. I mean, there's so much that we could talk about. And I want to go back for a second. So I understand the response. And we're going to talk about arbitration and the USCIB's role in arbitration and so on and its vision. But I wanted to ask you in particular. What does your job entail? In other words, what is the responsibilities that you have? 

Jason: So as director of legal affairs and general counsel, I am essentially the director of the arbitration committee, which I was just referring to. And I work side by side with Peter Sherwin, who is the chair of our arbitration committee. And we have, I think now 18 different subcommittees within this committee that it's a lot of plates to keep spinning. We have co-chairs from law firms around the United States and sole practitioners as well that run these various subcommittees that involve programming for events across the United States as well as abroad by our expat subcommittee, as well as looking at issue areas. J.P. Duffy from Reed Smith actually is one of the co-chairs of our new life sciences task force. And so we have a lot of different issue areas that we're tackling as a committee, and it's my job to help guide and direct that process across the different committees. I'm also the contact person when we receive these nominations requests, and also responsible for organizing the ICC commission on arbitration. But I have other issue areas that I I handle as well beyond arbitration. I serve as general counsel, so I do those types of general counsel tasks that one would expect in any organization. And I also handle the intellectual property portfolio. So we have member organizations and member businesses who are very focused on international intellectual property policy. And so that's also an area that I have responsibility for. 

José: In other words, your responsibility includes not just arbitration, but all of the other aspects of international business that would be of concern to the business community? 

Jason: That's right. That's right. We have another good example is within our trade portfolio, we have a focus on investor state issues. And so there is an aspect to that where we're working with UNIDOI and the ICC World Business Institute for a project that they're handling on international investment contracts. That's another area of current study. I think as bilateral and multilateral investment treaties begin to reduce the opportunities or narrow the opportunities to bring claims directly against states, it doesn't mean those disputes are going to go away. They're just going to probably happen in some other format. And I think that international investment contracts will probably be more often the recourse that we begin to see in cases where an investment has gone in a direction that was unexpected. 

José: Very, very interesting. That could be a topic of a podcast in and of itself. 

Jason: Absolutely. 

José: But we'll keep this one sort of at a more macro level. Jason, what is your, if there's a difference, I'll ask you about the USCIB perspective and your personal perspective, but they have the sense that they're likely as overlap. What is your sense of international arbitration, of course, looking towards the future? I mean, how do you see this? It's a very general question, but there's just so many aspects of, well, and you've given us a perfect example, investor state arbitration, gee, is it going to evolve and so on, or how is it evolving? On that sort of macro level, if you had to say, what are you know, what are the three most important trends or developments that you see headed towards a future international arbitration from the perspective of the business community? What do you think they would be? 

Jason: Well, I think there is certainly an expansion in specific subject matter areas and industries. I think we're seeing much more frequent use of international arbitration in the technology sector, which wasn't really the case 10 or 15 years ago. And I think that is certainly going to expand. There's a lot more energy, I think, coming from the arbitration community in California, where a lot of multinational technology companies are based and also where they are incubated in garages from the beginning. And so I think that, you know, leading up to the, you know, maybe within the past 10 years, it was more common to see companies, especially larger companies, using local courts and federal courts as their dispute resolution provisions because they had the negotiating leveraging contracts, international contracts, and they would push for that. And I think that sometimes, at some point, there was a dawning realization that winning in court on your home turf in an international case can be a bit of a pyrrhic victory because then you have to go and force that judgment. And if there aren