I didn’t start school until I was 13. I grew up in Liberia and it was wonderful growing up in the jungle because there were no schools! But my parents were increasingly nervous about how they were ‘mistreating’ their only son and told me I had to go to school. They had previously taken me to Sweden but having grown up in West Africa I didn’t care for Sweden’s winters very much. So they found some people in Los Angeles who would take me in, and I started in a public high school. Later, I would go to Harvard and Yale.
I started practising law in 1975 not having any idea of what I was doing. I began my career at Coudert Frères in Paris and like most people starting off, I didn’t know long I would do it, or whether I liked it, and whether Paris was the right city for me. I had no idea what practising law, or arbitration, was all about. My arrival coincided with a crisis for one of the clients in the firm – there was a dispute between the Libyan American Oil Company and the Libyan government. The concession agreement called for international arbitration under principles common to Libyan law and international law. I had studied international law at Yale and right off the bat the senior partner walks up the hall and asks if there was anybody who had studied it. That was the start – I never did anything else.
Coudert was a fractious firm, it was a very fun place to work – no idea was so crazy that they wouldn’t let you try it. You could say some of its lawyers were pioneers of the idea of what it is to be an international arbitration lawyer. But people would yell and scream, and ultimately the firm broke up ten years after I left.
I became a partner 14 years after starting out. At the time Freshfields had a well-known arbitration practice led by Alan Redfern and Martin Hunter who were a generation older than I. They were very kind to me and often doing similar cases, such as representing Kuwait. We often met in Paris, and they had the idea that a major practice in arbitration should be located in both London and Paris, because London had a lot of arbitration even though it didn’t have the ICC. They felt that Freshfields’ Paris office should have arbitration and spoke to me about that. I liked them very much and thought they were leaders in the field, so I joined.
My most memorable case was Bahrain v Qatar. The stakes were very high – Bahrain is a small country. Bahrain was faced with a claim against it by Qatar worth a third of the national territory. It was the longest case in the history of the International Court of Justice – ten years. The hearings were long – five weeks – which was a lot for that particular court, with 15 judges. At the time, the Crown Prince of Bahrain went to Sandhurst and was a soldier, and wasn’t fond of sitting and talking to lawyers all day and having an hour-long analysis of what two words mean in a treaty. But he became very involved and of course at the end of the case he became King Hamad. We have been close friends ever since.
The trick of arbitration is not whether it is effective but whether people think it is effective. If you had to enforce every single international contract subject to arbitration it would be a disaster and the end of international business. You don’t measure the success of arbitration by pointing out cases and seeing how they have been enforced in court, but by noting that there’s an awful lot of international business that goes on without disputes.
It’s all about persuading somebody. Arbitration in a Spanish court is very different to Norway, because the tools are different. But the magic that persuades people is empathy. Some people are just tone deaf and have no clue about how to influence somebody’s thinking. In international arbitration every case might be in a different city, conducted under different rules. So you need to be very adaptable.
Since arbitration has become more accessible, it’s exploded. The number of students who want to get into it is just incredible and more than the market can accommodate, which means the competition for jobs is insane. But it’s a very large investment, with uncertain returns. If someone pursues a career in arbitration because it seems to be glamorous and prestigious, they will not succeed. You will have competitors who don’t know as much as you but have that little spark. They’re not as good as you are, but actually they’re better, which is frustrating.
I am a guitarist – quite a few people in arbitration happen to be musicians, a lot of them like guitars.
Success comes at a cost. When you become very large, you meet yourself walking around the corner. You think there is a new thing you want to get involved in, and it turns out that your firm is already doing it and representing different interests, which may be conflicted. You continually run into that, almost to the point of saying: ‘There’s no point in trying to get new clients, but just make sure that our existing clients give us all of their business.’
Large law firms will continue to have a core group of steady clients that have reoccurring arbitration activity where there is no conflict of interest. This is a sustainable practice. I don’t think you can say that leaving a big firm and opening a boutique is strategically the correct way of doing this, it has to be more of what individuals feel like doing at a certain time in their career.
If Three Crowns grows quickly, the way successful firms have done, then it will be a failure. The idea here is to operate in a way where the five partners take on non-routine cases and offer significant added value. There will never be many jobs available here, and only for those people that are extremely accomplished and dedicated to what they are doing.
A typical day? There is no such thing. I change plans all the time. You don’t want to be the travel agent of someone like me.
Jan Paulsson is a founding partner of arbitration boutique Three Crowns.