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I've signed many contracts in my life that included an agreement to use a specific court in case of legal action. I'm in Europe, maybe that's unusual in the States?


Lawyers functioning as counsel for real companies will either (a) demand their own choice of law or (b) accept from a small list of known-acceptable choices of law.

It's hard to imagine any corporate counsel ever accepting binding arbitration using an arbitrator they hadn't hand-selected; with choice of arbitration rules comes concessions regarding discovery, regarding appeal, fees, rules of evidence, potentially regarding maximum awardable damages, the list goes on & on.

Choice of arbitration procedures is a much bigger wild card than choice of governing state law. An arbitration clause is more or less a binding promise not to sue, but instead resolve any dispute under an opaque and drastically simplified set of rules. Arbitration clauses are also, as far as I can tell, very much more enforceable when they occur in contracts between businesses.

This sounds like an obvious win when the dispute is over at most 5 figures of web site design; who would want to deal with years of court drama over that? The problem is, real lawyers won't be thinking of the 5 figure contractual amount; they'll instead be thinking of things like liability and IP protection, which are issues that can be denominated in sums that dwarf legal process costs.


Of course this is meant for cases where both parties do not have dedicated counsel; if they did, then they wouldn't shy away from international court in the first place, right? If judge.me doesn't screw up (which they easily could), I can envision them slowly growing, slowly spreading by word of mouth through the legal world, until they get on the "short list" of known-acceptable choices of law you mentioned.


I think it's a neat idea! More so the more I think about it, too. I'm just saying: if you stick it in your template master agreement, corp lawyers may bitch at you.




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