New Commercial Arbitration Rules Provide Predictability

Sidley Austin attorneys Angela Zambrano and Casey Burton look at two new sets of rules adopted late last year by one of the most widely used arbitral forums, the American Arbitration Association. The AAA revised its general Commercial Arbitration Rules, and it added a set of Optional Appellate Arbitration Rules. Some of the most important changes pertain to discovery: The new rules give the arbitrator the power to determine the reasonable search parameters for parties producing electronically stored information, to allocate costs of document production, to draw adverse inferences and to exclude evidence.