GAR Analysis

• No. of pending cases: 32
• Value of all claims: US$4.1billion
• No. of appearances in Who's Who: 4
• No. of treaty cases: 0
• No. of arbitration appointments (No. as chair or sole): 45(26)

Schellenberg Wittmer needs little introduction. The Swiss firm has more pillars of the arbitration community in two Swiss cities than many others can muster worldwide.

The firm is a fusion of Geneva and Zurich practices that each gave dispute resolution an emphasis. The Geneva firm in particular entered the merger in 2000 with a fully fledged, separate international arbitration team. In 1996, Schellenberg partner Laurent Lévy was encouraged to develop arbitration as a strategic niche area that could bring clients to the firm. Not long after Lévy minted a team, the highly regarded Gabrielle Kaufmann-Kohler joined as the other senior partner. In the past 10 years, Kaufmann-Kohler and Lévy have emerged as top arbitrators. Lévy is a vice president of the LCIA's court; Kaufmann-Kohler has sat on more panels at ICSID than any other individual, as chair, according to research GAR published in 2007. They have now detached themselves from the practice (see entry for Lévy Kaufmann-Kohler). The brand they helped to build, however, seems in little danger of fading in the new year - in fact, quite the opposite.

Excluding the two who have left, nine out of 29 Schellenberg Wittmer partners focus on international arbitration as counsel and arbitrators, of whom the majority feature in the recommended sections of the legal directories. The International Who's Who of Commercial Arbitration, for example, picks Georg von Segesser, Nathalie Voser, Anne Véronique Schlaepfer and David Roney. Von Segesser has been counsel or arbitrator in more than 100 arbitrations and always polls well in GAR research; Nathalie Voser is "very energetic"; Anne Véronique Schlaepfer and Elliott Geisinger are "impressive" and "excellent" respectively. Partner David Roney is also regarded as having a bright future. Among other things, he recently created the first organisation aimed at improving the standards of advocacy in international arbitration (the Foundation for International Arbitration Advocacy, launched in late 2007.) In a similar vein, Elliot Geiseinger sits on the executive board of the Swiss Arbitration Association, and Schlaepfer is co-founder and co-chair of the Young Arbitration Practitioners group.

The Geneva office has three partners and six associates in total, who work exclusively on international arbitration and obtain most of their work from outside Switzerland. "Given the size of our team we can't limit ourselves to competing only with Swiss firms. We compete - successfully - with international firms," says Schlaepfer.

A team in each city allows the partners to scale up more easily for big cases and to exploit each city's cultural connections, if the case so requires. "If I have an arbitration for a French company but with a German seat, or where the law is German, then having the Zurich office is exceptionally helpful," says Schlaepfer.

The arbitration partners also have mix of backgrounds - in nationality and legal training - by design. The firm has long emphasised that its arbitration recruits should have a mix of languages and exposure to a mix of laws. Roney, for example, has a background in Canadian common law.

Schlaepfer says that in the early days she and the other partners benefited from access to the wisdom and experience of two such influential figures as Lévy and Kaufmann-Kohler. As both sets of partners had become more successful, however, the generations had begun to impede one another. "In terms of visibility, it was really wonderful," she says, "but the success of the practice as counsel, as well as the growth of the firm overall, was leading to more and more complicated conflict situations. Lévy and Kaufmann-Kohler's decision simplifies matters greatly."