International arbitration is deeply rooted in party autonomy. Parties are free to decide whether they want to resolve their disputes by arbitration at all; how the arbitral proceedings should be conducted; and who their adjudicators should be. While parties to state court litigation may be able to designate a competent court (by way of a choice of court agreement) this freedom usually does not extend to the identity of the individuals who decide their cases. By contrast, it is one of the hallmarks of international arbitration that parties may determine the identity of their arbitrators. It is the proposition of this article that the exercise of this right results in an intuitu personae-choice of arbitrators and that this choice defines the degree to which international arbitrators may resort to assistance. In international arbitration, such assistance is usually referred to as the secretary of the arbitral tribunal. The article analyzes this position of a tribunal secretary, compares it to judicial assistants and suggests that the appropriate use of tribunal secretaries is defined by the parties' express agreements and implicit expectations regarding the arbitral process.

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Faced with a party’s procedural request, international arbitrators sometimes need to decide a delicate question: is this a legitimate exercise of the party’s procedural rights, or an unreasonable move, leading to an unnecessary delay of the proceedings? When answering this question, the fear that the eventual award might be challenged due to a violation of the parties’ due process rights lingers as the proverbial Sword of Damocles. Often, such “due process paranoia” will lead the arbitrator to grant unreasonable procedural requests, thus prolonging the proceedings unnecessarily. This neither benefits the parties nor the attractiveness of international arbitration as a dispute resolution mechanism. The present contribution attempts to ameliorate this situation. It reviews the state courts’ approach to dealing with arbitrators’ exercise of their procedural management discretion to reveal that “due process paranoia” is unfounded. Rather, the review brings to light what may be termed the “Procedural Judgment Rule”, a safe harbor for arbitrators’ exercise of their procedural discretion. The contribution encourages international arbitrators to embrace this discretion by conducting proactive proceedings. It offers methods to efficiently deal with delicate procedural management situations in order to avoid “due process paranoia” altogether.