Luis A. Perez and Genesis Martinez are featured thought leaders in the latest edition of Mealey’s International Arbitration Report. Perez, who chairs Akerman’s Latin America and the Caribbean Practice and is the Miami Co-Office Managing Partner, and Martinez, who is a litigation associate, discuss the standards of review and disclosure rules for arbitrators.

The authors wrote: “The current standards of review and disclosure rules for arbitrators could be stronger and require changes. The standards of review of the qualifications of an arbitrator are deficient as they basically rely on self-reporting by the arbitrators. The biggest problem is that arbitrators do not always disclose issues that could create a conflict and, in turn, the parties do not always have the means to ascertain the correctness or completeness of the disclosures. In addition, there is no way of doing away with inherent bias that the arbitrators might have. This becomes of greater concern when the tribunal is comprised of only one arbitrator. When the panel is comprised of three arbitrators there is a greater chance for ‘partiality.’ These types of inherent biases are not always disclosed and most parties will not be aware of those biases until given a chance to observe the arbitrators making decisions that reflect those biases.”