The Dispute Brief

Three days. Fifteen sessions. One building in Lagos. This is the final debrief.Today I take you through the last day of the 10th ICC Africa Conference on International Arbitration - five sessions covering the full range of what African arbitration is facing and where it is going.We start with PPPs and infrastructure disputes - the Lobito Corridor as a live case study, why dispute boards are resisted and why that resistance is costly, and the contractual versus treaty claim analysis that every practitioner advising on cross-border investments needs to understand before pulling any triggers.Then geopolitics. Matthew Weiniger KC of Linklaters explains how Russia's anti-suit injunction legislation is creating parallel proceedings in two jurisdictions that no longer recognise each other's authority - and what that means for how you draft arbitration clauses today. Pierre Daureu identifies five specific ways sanctions are entering arbitration proceedings from commencement to enforcement. And Leyou Tameru makes the case for Africa's neutrality as a genuine commercial opportunity - on a twenty to thirty year timeline.Then AI. Fabian Ajogwu SAN says we are in the era of pretence and it will expire. Inemesit Dike says something I have not heard said in a professional arbitration context before - about AI bias against the African market and the female gender, and whose responsibility it is to fix it. Noella Lubano reports from Kenya, where courts have already issued judgments setting aside AI-generated legal submissions.Then the 2026 ICC Rules - from the people who wrote them. Isaiah Bozimo SAN, Živa Filipič, Funmi Roberts, and Claudia Salomon on what actually changes, what it means for Nigerian practitioners, and why Claudia frames the whole revision as a push toward access to justice.And I close with the mock court session on cost allocation - and an honest account of what I can and cannot tell you about it.This is the last of three episodes from inside the conference. The Dispute Brief returns to the regular Season 2 schedule next Thursday.

Day one of the main conference. Lagos. Six sessions, six panels, six completely different conversations - and somehow, by the end of it, they all connected.In this debrief I take you through the full day at the 10th ICC Africa Conference on International Arbitration. We start with the ICC Court President in conversation with two Nigerian energy executives - and the line about trees that framed everything that followed. We move to the bench, where four African judges gave honest accounts of what their courts are actually doing with arbitration - including a Ghana story that stopped the room.Then I tell you about the session I cannot report on - and why that matters for every English-speaking African practitioner who has ever sat in a room where the conversation was happening in a language they could not follow.After that: expedited arbitration nine years on, the new highly expedited procedure that delivers awards in three months, and the uncomfortable question about whether traditional arbitration will still exist in its current form in ten years. Then the professional standing session - Dorothy Ufot SAN tells the story of how she walked into a CIArb examination she knew nothing about in 1999, and what happened next. And we close on digital economy disputes, where in-house counsel from Interswitch and MTN Nigeria tell you what dispute resolution actually looks like when USD 2 billion worth of airtime disappears in an hour.This is a long one. It earns the length.

I spent today at the ICC Institute of World Business Law Advanced Training on Drafting Enforceable Awards in Lagos - and I am bringing everything back to you.In this debrief, I cover what the sessions taught about drafting style, the civil law versus common law divide, and the six building blocks every award must contain. I go deep on the sections practitioners get wrong most often - jurisdiction, damages, interest, and costs - including a real example of a Nigerian enforcement attempt that failed because three words were missing from the award.I also take you inside the ICC scrutiny process in a way most practitioners never get to see, and walk you through a mock court session where our working group tore apart a defective draft award line by line.If you draft awards, appear before tribunals, or advise clients who need those awards enforced - this episode is for you.