Originally from Investment Treaty Arbitration and International Law – Preview Page

PANEL 2 

MS. KATE BROWN DE VEJAR: I’m going to start with just a quick apology for not being with you at nine o’clock this morning. As many of you had to travel from New York, you know air traffic was just horrendous, and so I didn’t get in until late. We’re very pleased to have you here at our offices in Toronto. It’s a great day to be in Toronto. We’ll see what tonight brings. DLA Piper’s International arbitration practice has an amazing footprint. We have five offices in Canada, which means we’re in Edmonton, we’re in Calgary, in addition to Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto. We’re one of the few law firms in North America that also has a really extensive footprint well deep into Latin America. And that gives us a really interesting way of servicing our clients who may come from one jurisdiction and may be publicly listed in another jurisdiction, and yet their projects or their interests or their resources are in a third jurisdiction where they may be experiencing some issues. It is one of the things that I think is a hallmark of the practice. That aside, having JURIS in our office today is a very special thing for us, because this is the conference that I did, I think for the first time, more than 10 years ago. I think it’s one of the most interesting, deep formats. You actually get really into initial substance. I want to thank all of the folks who prepared the papers. I know it’s not a small job to take on, but with that, in the spirit of our last panel, you are contributing to our practice, and we thank you.  I’ll pass it now over to Ian. You are moderator for this panel. Thank you very much to everyone involved. I really appreciate it. 

MR. IAN LAIRD: Welcome everybody to our second panel of the day. This is the 19th edition of this conference, and I just wanted to congratulate our organizer, our mentor, our instigator, Todd Weiler, who founded this conference, as I said 19 years ago in Washington, DC. And the model has been remarkably consistent in the sense that, and we just heard that, the main objective of this conference is to provide an opportunity and to provide profile for young practitioners, young academics who may not otherwise be able to be involved in a conference like this, and to provide a contribution and provide a chapter to a book.