The growth of commercial arbitration during the past three decades is principally attributable to the U.S. Supreme Court’s broad embrace of the arbitration process and its rejection of legal doctrines that try to limit the effective use of arbitration. Arbitration was further transformed during the 1980s and 1990s by a series of decisions that have made it more accessible and its enforcement more predictable. This development in turn has encouraged businesses to consider arbitration for many of their larger and more important disputes and has encouraged individual neutrals and providers to promote arbitration as an effective alternative to the court system.
Popularity has not been without drawbacks. As counsel have become more sophisticated in dispute process design, arbitrations now often have many elements of a complicated court trial, and the complexity of managing and conducting arbitrations has increased. Detailed pleadings, broad-based discovery, requests for provisional relief, dispositive motions and application of rules of evidence are more common, as are requests for reviews of arbitration orders and awards. One only has to see the number of process issues included in the 2000 revision of the Uniform Arbitration Act, to see this dynamic change. This trend also explains why there are so many more decided cases addressing arbitration issues.
