International commercial courts (ICommCs) are an ideal breeding ground for new technologies: delicate cross-border disputes cannot be adequately managed and resolved, if courts do not harness the potential of information and communications technologies. Mindful of this, ICommCs tend to infuse their procedures with technology, with a view to maximising efficiency and enhancing their attractiveness on the market for dispute resolution services. This chapter provides a comparative overview of the different uses of technology at ICommCs, following the typical chronological development of an international dispute: from the conclusion of the choice-of-court agreement, throughout the key stages of the proceedings (e.g. case-management conference, written submissions, taking of oral evidence), until the enforcement of the resulting judgment. The chapter assesses the impact of different technologies on ICommC litigation, not only in terms of efficiency, but also with regard to due process, and the enforceability of the resulting judgment.

By 2020 law firms will be faced with a “tipping point” for a new talent strategy. Now is the time for all law firms to commit to becoming AI-ready by embracing a growth mindset, set aside the fear of failure and begin to develop internal AI practices.1

Digitalization and the development of automated systems, as well as the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), have radically changed the legal landscape and will continue to impact law at an accelerated pace. These developments have led to the creation of a new industry, legal tech (LT), which aims at creating technological applications specifically tailored for law and the legal market. LT includes a broad range of applications: some of the most prominent and recurrent examples include automation in the drafting of contracts, “mining” case-law, or the creation of smart dispute resolution systems not requiring human intervention. As a result, operations that were previously unthinkable, or that would demand an enormous amount of human resources, can now be readily done through numerous legal services available to lawyers, other professionals, and consumers.1 The rise of LT has brought about various responses, from those who advocate the innovating potential of LT2 to legal traditionalists that consider the replacement of human resources by technology to be highly disruptive.3 In addition, there are those who advocate for a level-headed distinction between “hype” and reality.4 Nonetheless, it would be shortsighted not to see that the advancement of LT is going to have a profound impact on the legal sector, in a degree similar to that which industrialization had on manufacturing.

Any discussion of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) necessarily relies on some basic, shared notions, allowing us to identify those procedures that are considered an alternative to litigation in national courts. When legal scholars refer to arbitration or mediation, for instance, they often take it for granted that those linguistic labels are sufficient to designate a certain procedure. To be sure, none of these labels have a monolithic quality: the word ‘arbitration’, for instance, designates a family of private adjudication phenomena, which can differ in significant ways. Each ADR mechanism, hence, is best understood as a spectrum of procedures. Nevertheless, all of the instances falling within that spectrum must necessarily have some shared broad-stroke feature, so that they can all (with an unavoidable degree of simplification) be referred to as arbitration, mediation or another ADR mechanism. In other words, there must necessarily be some boundaries that lawyers heuristically deploy to build a rough yet shared taxonomy of ADR.