Arbitration in Lithuania: the matter of fact

ENAs a post-Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) country, Lithuania started to learn about commercial arbitration less than two decades ago, after restoration of independence in 1990. It was not an easy task to accomplish. The dispute resolution culture was not in favour of private settlement of disputes, such as different alternative dispute resolution (ADR) techniques with the help of an independent private third party. For more than 50 years disputes were resolved only through state courts in Lithuania. Accordingly, in the first place, it was a question of confidence and reliability to entrust dispute settlement to a new type of forum. In addition, little knowledge existed among the legal community about the principles applicable to arbitral proceedings, both in domestic and international contexts. Despite these impediments, progress was quite rapid. The first textbook on commercial arbitration was published in Lithuanian in 1997. Coauthored by a leading Lithuanian civil procedure professor, Prof. Valentinas Mikelėnas, the book still remains the pacemaker. The first courses on arbitration were offered at universities around the same time. The Law on Commercial Arbitration (LCA) followed soon - in 1996.Commercial arbitration institutions aroused curiosity with their first cases. For example, journalists with TV cameras were invited to the first international commercial arbitration case at the Vilnius International Commercial Arbitration, shown on TV as breaking news. The parties to the dispute, having some sense of the principle of confidentiality, were shocked, of course. As absurd as it was, this case was, nonetheless, a good lesson for Lithuanian arbitration institutions and practitioners and, hopefully, spectacles of this kind will not occur in the future. The concentration of arbitration practice in very few institutions most probably can be explained by the desire to avoid analogous mistakes. It also puts constraints on 'wild' experimenting and on the speed of growth of the number of arbitration cases. If compared to Latvia where at the moment there are more than 140 registered arbitration institutions, Lithuania has only a few of these, and only one is officially registered as a permanent arbitration institution.3 This also explains the wide discrepancy in the number of arbitral awards. Thus, in Latvia each year several thousands of arbitration awards are issued, whereas in Lithuania they are measured in tens.