Event
LIDW26 Main Conference: Tradition, Trust and Transformation
2 June 2026 · London · In person · London International Disputes Week
The flagship conference of London International Disputes Week 2026, on tradition, trust and transformation in disputes.
What happened
Locus Standi editorial
London International Disputes Week returned for 2026 under the banner Tradition, Trust and Transformation, and on the organisers' own count it was the largest yet: more than 11,000 delegates from over 120 jurisdictions, around 370 member-hosted events across the city, and a sold-out opening reception at Southwark Cathedral. The shape of the week is by now familiar: a NextGen Academy for junior practitioners, a sold-out International Arbitration Day spread across three host venues, the Main Conference at the QEII Centre, and then two days of member-hosted events filling chambers and firms across London. The theme ran through almost every room: the field is changing fast, and the question is what to keep.
The main stage: an unruly world The Main Conference opened with Sean West of The Unruly Corporation arguing that the rules the profession cut its teeth on in the globalisation era are "falling away", and asking what practitioners are doing with the infrastructure they rely on when the old patterns no longer hold. It was a deliberately unsettling start, and the day kept returning to it. On a panel defending the rule of law, Fiona Hill warned of a politics happy with rhetoric but not with the detail of rule-based governance. Closing the day, the Master of the Rolls, Sir Geoffrey Vos, turned the week's theme into an instruction: embrace change, and in doing so preserve the profession and the dispute resolution that clients actually came for. Tradition and transformation were not framed as a choice but as two things to hold at once.
Evidence, AI and authenticity Artificial intelligence was the most argued-over subject of the week, and the most interesting version of the argument was about evidence. A Main Conference panel on AI, authenticity and future evidence, with the former Lord Chief Justice Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd alongside the arbitrator Sophie Nappert, pressed on how the community keeps confidence in evidence that can now be fabricated or quietly shaped by a model; Lord Thomas struck a calm note, reminding the room that the profession has "proved surprisingly adaptable" before. A Baker Botts and Exponent session pushed into the hard part: the black-box problem, where a valuation expert using generative tools may not be able to explain why a model produced a given output, and explainable AI as a possible answer for tribunals weighing credibility. Elsewhere a session hosted by RPC and Stephenson Harwood put the blunt question of whether AI will ever replace human arbitrators, and the room split, the case for speed and consistency running into pushback from institutional voices on the judgment calls a model cannot make. The thread reached its sharpest point away from the panels, when the Chief Justice of India, Justice Surya Kant, drew a firm line on AI in mediation, insisting that resolving a dispute means you have to apply your brain and heart.
Frontiers, mass claims and the rule of law Three Main Conference sessions tested where the law runs out. A panel on law at the frontiers, deep seabed, space and the Arctic, asked whether existing international rules can govern disputes in places where major powers are willing to reinterpret or ignore established norms. A session on the rise of mass claims weighed access to justice against the risk of chilling investment, with the panel's answer being not to narrow access but to build a system that weeds out weak claims early and lets the strongest proceed. Underneath both sat the rule-of-law panel's plainer worry, that defending the rule of law can no longer be taken for granted and that lawyers are among its custodians.
Geopolitics, sanctions and enforcement If one current ran beneath the week, it was the collision of disputes with geopolitics. A panel hosted by LK Law traced the use of Russian bankruptcy proceedings to chase assets across borders since Western companies left, while a seminar from 4-5 Gray's Inn Square and Barnes Law went deeper into sanctions as a defence to payment obligations and the shifting fortunes of the Lugovoy Law, with Maxim Kulkov mapping how Russian claimants are adapting. The Ministry of Defence of Ukraine's Dmytro Koval offered a rare vantage on arbitrating military supply contracts. White & Case's enforcement sessions, drawing on Africa, Asia, India and the MENA region, pressed a single discipline: build enforcement into strategy from day one, mapping asset networks and engaging investigators early, because an award has limited value if it cannot be enforced. Running alongside, sessions on payments at Freshfields and on crypto recovery from Fieldfisher and Osborne Clarke tracked disputes moving from SWIFT to stablecoins, and freezing orders against persons unknown on decentralised networks that, as one panel put it, are happening now.
The India-UK axis The strongest single thread of the week was the India-UK relationship, woven through panels, conferences and a state-level address. The General Counsels' Association of India, with BCLP and the Law Society, convened Two Nations, One Legal Future, where the Minister of State for Law and Justice and senior advocates debated enforcement, the Bar Council rules on foreign lawyers, mediation and AI. A session on arbitrating with the Indian State, co-hosted by Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, JSA and the Mumbai Centre for International Arbitration, produced one of the most quoted moments of the week: Justice L. Nageswara Rao observed that few bureaucrats in India will settle a government dispute by mediation for fear of later being accused of favouritism, a candid diagnosis of why mediation struggles where the state is a party. On the merits of mediation, JSA's Sidharth Sethi argued that it is not new to India but deeply rooted in its culture, and that the real question is which mechanism best preserves business value and future cooperation. At Guildhall, the Bar Council of England and Wales and the Arbitration Bar of India closed the cultural distance with the historian William Dalrymple, while a conference on arbitrating Indo-UK disputes gave the candid assessment that India aspires to be a leading seat but still contends with court delays and a continued pull toward London and Singapore for the largest matters.
Seats, institutions and new jurisdictions The practitioner sessions kept the week grounded in how the work gets done. On arbitration versus litigation, Paula Hodges KC and the litigator Carsten van de Sande found more in common than the usual rivalry suggests, agreeing that procedure works best when it is proportionate and that both sides share an interest in keeping costs low. The Arbitral Institutions Congress, moderated by Khawar Qureshi KC, brought the PCA, CIETAC, HKIAC and the Swiss Arbitration Centre together on building more adaptive, user-focused services, and WilmerHale weighed London against Singapore as competing seats. The most striking newcomer was Saudi Arabia: a Clyde & Co, SCCA, Queen Mary and Wexler session, with the SCCA's Dr Hamed Merah, set out an arbitration regime maturing fast, with rules aligned to global standards, a digital platform turning settlements into enforceable instruments, and an enforcement overhaul that decriminalises commercial debt, positioning the Kingdom as a credible seat for energy and construction disputes. International Arbitration Day, opened by Lord Neuberger across three host venues, kept the focus on due process and court intervention, and a Bar Bulletin interview series captured working practitioners on the recurring frustrations of tribunal availability, hearing delays and the case for a more enforcement-friendly posture.
Legal tech and the next generation The transformation half of the theme had its own programme. A LegalTech Showcase fronted by the courts minister Sarah Sackman KC MP made the government's pitch that English law and London's legal-tech base reinforce each other, citing more than 400 lawtech businesses in the UK and further public funding behind them. The NextGen Academy, now in its third edition, ran a hands-on AI tools workshop with the founders building those tools and an Oxford-style debate on whether experts are hired guns, a provocation that drew out the real tensions around expert independence and conflicts of interest.
The week beyond the panels For all the substance on stage, the week's character was as social as it was intellectual. The opening at Southwark Cathedral set the tone, and the Ciarb Fellows and Friends reception was a highlight for many, the kind of evening where a membership starts to feel like a community. That, in the end, is part of what a week like this is for: the arguments in the room matter, but so does the room they are argued in.
The detail
Date: 2 June 2026
Location: London, London
Format: In person
Field: Arbitration
Cost: Paid
Organiser: London International Disputes Week
Hosts: London International Disputes Week