Originally from the Journal of Damages in International Arbitration

Preview Page

MR. MILES:  All right.  So our second panel this morning is our power and construction panel.  It is chaired by James Searby, who is a senior managing director and FTI Consulting’s economic and financial consulting practice.  He’s based in Washington.  And his expertise is in the field of valuation, whether businesses, contracts, damages, intellectual property, or financial assets.  James has given both written and oral testimony in both national courts and international arbitrations under a variety of institutional rules.  Back in 2001 to 2015, prior to moving to Washington, he led FTI Consulting’s international arbitration practice in the Asia Pacific region.
James, welcome and thank you.

MR. SEARBY:  Great.  Thank you very much.  Thank you all for coming back from coffee to hear the second panel.  I’d like to thank Juris and Mike Kitzen for putting on the event for the sixth year and to the co-chairs, Miguel and Craig, for kindly inviting me to moderate this panel today. And, also, of course, to the first Panel for pointing out Kaj’s neglect of the value of love puppets as a simple tool for explaining complex issues to tribunals.

The subject matter of this panel is damages in IA disputes in the power industry. And by “power” I mean here the conventional power industry, made up of generators with positive marginal cost, grid operators and distributors of electric power.  A later panel will discuss damages in the renewable energy sector.  In some ways, they’re the lucky guys because that’s where much of the arbitration action is today, although I accept that renewable and conventional electricity generation feed into a common grid, which means they cannot be wholly treated separately from one another.  Even so, we’ve done our best to keep to our lane and to stick to the brief that we’ve been given.