Louise Barrington
Louise Barrington is an international dispute resolver with 30 years of experience. She practiced commercial and family litigation in Ontario, Canada before moving into international commercial arbitration after graduate studies in Paris. A Canadian, she is a permanent resident of Hong Kong and holds a British passport, and is legally qualified in Ontario, New York and England & Wales. A member arbitrator of Toronto’s Arbitration Place and until recently, Littleton Chambers in London, she is regularly appointed by parties and by institutions as co-arbitrator, sole arbitrator and chair, under UNCITRAL Rules, and for AAA-ICDR.HKIAC, CIArb, SIAC and AAA-ICDR.
For over 25 years, she has arbitrated commercial disputes involving sales (goods under CISG, English law and UCC, mixed sales and service agreements under various American, Asian and European laws), construction and engineering, banking, franchises, insurance, wrongful dismissal, intellectual property and licensing, tort, shareholder disputes, agency and procurement. In Canada she has also chaired financial services disciplinary hearings, investigated bank/consumer disputes and has acted as sole arbitrator in numerous domestic insurance cases.
For many years Ms. Barrington served on Hong Kong’s ICC Arbitration Commission nomination committee. She taught international arbitration both as a law faculty member (at HK’s CityU and Chinese U), directed the Construction Law and Dispute Resolution Programme at King’s College London, and has been an external professor (Osgoode Hall in Toronto, PUC in Sao Paulo, Charles University in Prague, Latrobe in Melbourne, to name a few). She and is creator and director of the Dispute Resolution Module for the SiLS on-line LLM in International Commercial Law, subsequently attached to Australia’s Bond University. She has taught and/or assessed senior arbitrators for Fellowship of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, the Hong Kong Institute of Arbitrators and the Toronto Commercial Arbitration Society (TCAS). She is also an accredited mediator. She has served on the IIROC panel and chaired several hearings and written decisions, the most recent of which was affirmed by the Ontario Divisional Court.
She founded and directs the annual Vis East Arbitration Moot (www.cisgmoot.org) now in its 19th year, and is founder and former co-president of ArbitralWomen (www.arbitralwomen.org). She also helped develop the Young International Mediators’ Competition, subsequently re-titled Mediate Wise. She is chief editor of The Danubia Files: Lessons in Award Writing from the Vis Moot, and established Vis East Moot’s Capacity Building Programmes in Cambodia and Myanmar, and for 2023, Nepal.
She created the ArbitralWomen Diversity ToolkitTM, sponsored by the AAA-ICDR Foundation, and received the CPR Diversity Award in 2011. She is fluent in English and French, comfortable in conversational Spanish, remembers some basic German and sketchy Mandarin.