Crowell & Moring is a relative newcomer to the Washington, DC arbitration market. The practice group took on its current form in 2006 to 2007, when a team joined from Fulbright & Jaworski.

The names to know are: Alexandre de Gramont, Stuart Newberger, and Arif Ali, who joined from Fulbright & Jaworski, having previously been a member of the Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer team in Paris. Ali has also worked at the United Nations Compensation Commission and as senior counsel at the World Intellectual Property Organisation's Arbitration and Mediation Centre.He speaks English, Spanish, French, Urdu, Hindi and Bengali. In the younger strata, Baiju Vasani, who accompanied Ali from the same firm, is regarded as a name for the future. He and Ali both teach arbitration courses at Georgetown. Ali is also on the faculty of the Centre for Oil, Gas and Mineral Law at the University of Dundee.

In London, partner Jane Wessel covers arbitration. Ali and Vasani are also regularly in London. Despite its recent provenance, the practice is already to be found locking horns with the field's biggest names. In 2008, for example, Crowell & Moring was in the GAR headlines for a case against Turkey, in which a panel of arbitrators ordered Turkey to stop its security services from passing intercepted e-mails to a team defending an Energy Charter Treaty case (Turkey is represented by Freshfields). Also in 2008, Crowell & Moring gained a pair of awards in ICSID cases worth US$18.5 million and US$5.5 million to its client Duke Energy, against Peru and Ecuador respectively. The firm has also taken over enforcment of the "CMS award" still unpaid by Argentina (CMS has assigned the award to the Bank of America). Another highlight, according to Ali, was success in a series of pitches: the team added a new case per month for nine months. It also completed two strategic lateral hires:

• Daniel Vielleville, 38 - he joined from Squire Sanders & Dempsey in Miami. Vielleville is a dual-qualified lawyer (Venezuela and the US). One of his more notable representations has been for the Republic of Chile in its case against former president Augusto Pinochet; and
• Samaa Haridi, 32 - she joined from Thacher Proffitt & Wood. An Egyptian-US national, Haridi trained in France and the US and will work in New York. She speaks fluent English, Arabic and French.