International arbitration is supposed to offer a sophisticated, neutral and commercially sensible way to resolve major cross-border disputes. Too often, however, clients experience something very different: a process that is already expensive becoming vastly more costly because they entrusted the case to a firm whose business model depends on charging as much as possible for as long as possible.
This raises an uncomfortable question: why do clients continue to tolerate excessive international arbitration fees when better-value alternatives are readily available?
The answer is not necessarily that clients are unaware of those alternatives or indifferent to cost. More often, it is fear. Faced with a high-stakes dispute, in-house counsel and business principals often conclude that the safest course is to instruct one of the largest and most expensive firms in the market. The instinct is understandable. When the sums at stake are substantial, no one wants to be accused of cutting corners. In that context, hiring a well-known global brand can feel less like a legal decision and more like a form of insurance.
But that sense of security is illusory. What the client is really buying is not a better outcome, because the result will always depend heavily on the underlying merits of the case. What it is buying, with certainty, is an extraordinarily expensive arbitration.
A recent article in Global Arbitration Review illustrates the point starkly. GAR described a recent English case[1] in which an English judge ordered a review of more than USD 35 million in legal fees billed over roughly 22 months in connection with five LCIA arbitrations and related proceedings. The court was troubled not because the lawyers had failed to work hard, but because the client had not been properly informed of rate increases and was not being kept adequately updated as costs escalated far beyond what he said he could afford. The law firm was seeking payment of USD 18,923,316.10 said to remain unpaid out of the overall USD 35,343,213.96 billed.[2] That is not a story about efficiency. It is a story about how quickly arbitration fees can become detached from any reasonable sense of proportionality.[3]
The deeper problem is that many clients still wrongly equate size and price with quality. They assume that the biggest firms have the deepest benches, the strongest institutional knowledge and the greatest ability to manage complex international disputes. Sometimes that assumption is justified. But it does not follow that such firms deliver better outcomes than specialist arbitration boutiques. There is no evidence that paying several multiples more in legal fees reliably improves the result. Arbitration is not a luxury market in which a higher price tag proves superior performance.
In fact, many of the best arbitration teams in the world are now found at specialist boutiques. They are staffed by lawyers who have handled the same treaty disputes, commercial arbitrations and enforcement battles as their counterparts at global firms, often with greater partner involvement, leaner teams, a track record at least as strong as that of their counterparts at global firms, and a more disciplined approach to cost. Clients today are therefore not choosing between quality and economy. More often, they are choosing between one excellent team structured around fee generation and another excellent team structured to resolve disputes efficiently.
That distinction matters. When a major firm charges extraordinary hourly rates, layers in numerous timekeepers, increases rates during the life of the matter, and sends invoices that no business would accept from any other supplier, the client may tell itself that this is simply the cost of serious dispute resolution. It is not. It is the cost of a particular billing model.
And that billing model has done real damage to international arbitration itself. Arbitration has long been presented as a rational alternative to sprawling domestic court litigation. Yet many users come away with the opposite impression: that it is slow, opaque and ruinously expensive. When a company or individual feels overcharged at every stage of a major arbitration, the lesson drawn is not just about one law firm. It is that international arbitration itself cannot be trusted to deliver value. The harm therefore extends far beyond a single invoice or dispute. It weakens confidence in the system as a whole.
Big Law bears much of the blame for that deterioration in confidence. Arbitrators, institutions and procedural excess all contribute to rising costs, but legal fees are typically the largest line item in any arbitration budget and one of the few costs clients can meaningfully control. When counsel treat a dispute as an open-ended billing exercise rather than a problem to be solved efficiently, the client pays twice: first in legal fees, and then in diminished confidence that arbitration is a credible means of resolving serious disputes.
Clients should therefore be far more sceptical. When a significant international dispute arises, in-house counsel should not simply default to the usual giant firms on the assumption that the matter is too important to be handled by anyone else. Instead, they should approach three to five arbitration firms and require each to provide a serious budget and, where possible, a genuine cap on legal fees that will actually be honoured. Not a vague estimate. Not a “working assumption.” A real cap, supported by clear assumptions, defined exceptions and meaningful accountability if the team exceeds it.
That simple client discipline could help reshape the market. It would force firms to confront hard questions about staffing, internal duplication, partner leverage and whether every procedural step is truly necessary. It would also allow clients to compare not just reputations, but judgment, efficiency and cost discipline. A firm that cannot articulate clearly how it intends to control costs in a major arbitration is already revealing something important about how it is likely to run the case.
None of this is to suggest that clients should always choose the cheapest firm. International arbitration is far too important for that, and many firms are simply not capable of handling major cases well. The point is that price should not be mistaken for safety, nor prestige for value. The real question is not which firm charges the most or produces the thickest invoices, but which can deliver first-rate advocacy, sound strategic judgment and disciplined case management at a cost proportionate to the dispute. Clients who fail to ask that question are not buying certainty. They are merely buying expense without any guarantee of better results.
The deeper problem is that overcharging does not merely harm individual clients. It harms international arbitration as a system of dispute resolution. When parties come away from an arbitration feeling that they were overbilled at every stage, they are unlikely to see the process as efficient, commercially rational or worth ever using again. In that way, excessive legal fees do more than distort a single case. They undermine confidence in arbitration itself and erode the very advantages that made it attractive in the first place.
The market is unlikely to correct itself unless clients become more sceptical. Until they scrutinise budgets more closely, question staffing models more aggressively and refuse to equate prestige with value, the incentives will remain badly misaligned. International arbitration will become more proportionate only when clients insist that it be run not as an open-ended billing exercise, but as a disciplined and commercially sensible means of resolving serious disputes.
For readers seeking counsel in international arbitration, Aceris Law is an international arbitration boutique that advises clients in commercial and investment disputes worldwide.
[1] Safra v Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP [2026] EWHC 703 (SCCO).
[2] Id. [1].
[3] T. Jones, Brazilian billionaire gets review of WilmerHale arbitration fees, Global Arbitration Review, 7 April 2026.