Arbitration is often accused of elitism. Elitism does not sound bad at all. It sounds proud. Arbitration courts are ideal for those who adhere to the rules, such as confidentiality, compromise, irrevocability and voluntary compliance with the award, and hearings are more cultured than those in courts of law. An increase in the number of gentlemen in business engenders a corresponding increase in arbitration cases. All that non-gentlemen can do is to bear with the rigmarole of tedious, never-ending public court lawsuits. 

This is the news we arbitrators should spread out and imprint directly on the entrepreneur’s mind, even at the cost of side-stepping his or her advisers. We should tell them that arbitration is elegant, cultured, noble and trendy. It eschews the dense atmosphere of crowded courtrooms. 

When promoting arbitration, we should tell businesspeople outright that they should avoid common courts where one has to mingle with convicted felons, handcuffed suspects, noisy TV crews casting about for a sound bite from a white-collar criminal or a corrupt politician. We, practitioners and theoreticians alike, should promote arbitration far and wide, ensuring that awareness of this elegant form of dispute resolution goes far beyond our arbitration conferences. We should ensure that the entrepreneur himself makes this suggestion to his or her lawyer: “Counsel, please put an arbitration clause into the contract. I want an arbitration rather than a public court dispute.”