I thought this was a really decent crack at the topic, especially from a student. I wouldn’t have understood any of this when I was a student, so I’m impressed.

I’m not sure it’s reasonable to expect a writer at that level to reach a firm conclusion on the future of the commercial court.

I am more curious to hear about the courts and arbitration centres being set up where UK talent is being imported for the purpose of providing an alternative UK law-based seat. I seem to recall one of the central Asian countries big in oil and gas doing so.

I like this column, but this is one of the less incisive conclusions.

Fallacy of assuming that just because other countries have set up Commercial Courts, that they will immediately and successfully take away London’s business.

Civil law jurisdictions are unlikely to get much traction with Commercial Courts because the problem is not whether the Courts use English, but lack of predictable outcomes when other cases are not formally binding.

Singapore is more of a potential threat, but unlikely to be so in practice. The relative sizes of the jurisdictions makes that clear – Singapore has approximately 6,000 lawyers (total), while England and Wales has approx 200,000.

Cyprus – forget it. The reliability of their court system would need to vastly improve.

As “Commercial Litigator” pointed out, there is unlikely to be any difference between the costs of the lawyers.

The differences in the costs of the forum, however, are huge. The maximum cost of a trial of any length in the Commercial Court is about £12K; £10K money claim issue fee + £569 for non-monetary remedies + £1,175 trial fee + maybe a couple of procedural applications at £275 a pop.

Contrast with a commercial arbitration, where the parties have to pay for the arbitrator’s time. A decent commercial silk will burn through £12K in no time at all. The forum cost of a multi-week trial will likely run to hundreds of thousands.

In the main Berezovsky v Abramovich trial, the Court sat for about 40 sitting days. I would expect that the judge spent considerably more than 40 days on top of that reading the voluminous documents and the 4,000+ pages of submissions, and preparing the judgment. The cost of a decent commercial silk acting as arbitrator for all that would have been well over £1m.

Finally, I believe the reason the English Commercial Court has been so popular has to do with the history of English law and it’s reliability (although English law can be determined in a foreign jurisdiction), England tends to be a neutral jurisdiction and so is often the chosen jurisdiction and law of choice in agreements and lastly the Commercial Court is well trodden ground.

I don’t see the use of the London Commercial Court diminishing in the near future.