Weil Gotshal & Manges has aggressively built up its global arbitration team with the hire of a key divisional head from Crowell & Moring, along with three new partners.
Arif Hyder Ali (pictured), based in Washington, has assumed the role of co-chair of Weil’s International Arbitration Practice. Alexandre de Gramont, Samaa Haridi, and Theodore R. Posner accompany Ali to Weil as partners. De Gramont and Posner will also be based in Washington, Haridi in New York. The other co-chair of Weil’s International Arbitration Practice, Juliet Blanch, remains based in London.
Until this move, Ali was chair and De Gramont was vice-chair of Crowell & Moring’s International Arbitration Practice. Posner served as a partner in Crowell & Moring’s International Trade Group, while Haridi was a partner in the firm’s International Dispute Resolution Group.
Ali joins Weil at a time of rising demand across the globe for arbitrators with expertise in cross-border litigation. “Following the Arab spring, there is a huge need for new infrastructure, for hospitals, schools, and roads. Things go wrong. You need dispute resolution specialists. You’ll also see huge intellectual property disputes -- this is a very hot field right now,” Ali said.
Ali sees investors not just in the US or Canada, but in India, Egypt, Brazil, and elsewhere looking to opportunities in places with developing infrastructure like China. “You’ve got investors who are sinking a lot of money to dig a well, to build roads, to explore, but these long-term contracts don’t dovetail with the political circumstances. Contracts are for five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, sometimes longer, and all sorts of things occur in the life-cycles of these contractual relationships. The last place you want to end up is in the other country’s courts,” Ali said.
“If one looks at the flow of project financing and new investment dollars, there is a lot of Middle Eastern money going into South and Southeast Asia, and also into Latin America, so I would also see disputes there,” he added.
Regarding the working environment at his new employer, Ali said, “Our people here [at Weil] are multilingual, multicultural, multijurisdictional. They can interview in Arabic, French, Chinese” and other languages.