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Julia Bihary

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Julia is the Pro Bono Counsel for the Firm’s London and Paris offices and leads the Firm’s Pro Bono and corporate social responsibility projects in these offices.

She has a background in Litigation, where she specialised in complex commercial litigation and arbitration matters and is a solicitor advocate with Higher Rights of Audience.

Julia participated in Proskauer’s Women's Sponsorship Program, an initiative that champions high-performing mid-level and senior lawyers as emerging leaders.

She is fluent in English, Hungarian and German.

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In the first part of this article, we discussed why we need experts in international arbitration, how to find the right expert to instruct, and some practical guidance on how to work with experts for the best results. In this second part of the series, we consider what expert reports should cover, the ins-and-outs of expert meetings and some practical tips and tricks for oral testimony.

In this article series, we look at key arbitration related decisions from the past year and draw out the key lessons for users of arbitration.

Arbitral awards are rarely set aside by national courts but the 2023 English case of The Federal Republic of Nigeria v Process & Industrial Developments Ltd. involved an extraordinary and successful challenge to an US $11bn award for serious irregularity, despite the high threshold applied by English law. The judgment expressly invited the arbitration community to reflect on best practice for disputes involving states and large sums to ensure fairness and the visible integrity of the process.

We have previously reported on changes the Law Commission was considering to the Arbitration Act 1996 (the Act). The Law Commission has now published its final report (the Final Report, available here).

The report draws to a close a review of English arbitration legislation that began in January 2022. A draft bill to implement the Commission’s conclusions and recommendations into law is provided with the report so it is now for the UK government to decide whether to introduce those changes to parliament.

England is one of the most popular jurisdictions for commercial parties to resolve disputes through arbitration: London and Paris were ranked as the top two preferred cities in the world in 2022. To ensure England’s arbitration regime remains modern and competitive, the Law Commission –  a body responsible for considering and recommending legislative change to the UK government – is currently considering updates to the legal framework of arbitration in England & Wales, the Arbitration Act 1996 (the Act).

Who can be held responsible when a rogue actor directs payment from a company’s bank account?  Unless discovered quickly, stolen funds are usually quickly spirited away from easy recovery. Victims of fraud therefore look for other sources of compensation, including the bank itself who executed the instruction. In England, when banks and financial institutions have reasonable grounds to believe that a payment instruction is an attempt to misappropriate a customer’s funds, they owe a duty of care to that customer to refrain from making or executing the order and make necessary inquiries before proceeding.

Mediation is globally recognized as an effective dispute resolution mechanism. A trained mediator can assist apparently diametrically opposed parties in finding a resolution that avoids the time and costs of court proceedings, especially fully contested and lengthy final hearings. Over 50 countries have signed the United Nations Convention on International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation (the Singapore Convention) under which settlement agreements resulting from a mediation process can be recognized and enforced internationally without the need to bring a court claim for breach of the settlement agreement.