At Freie Universität Berlin, Christian Armbrüster, alongside Co-Chair Cecilia Carrara (Legance), welcomed the audience to an insightful debate on “Arbitration in Germany and Italy – Recent Developments”. This well-attended gathering replicated the success of a previous event under the same conference title in 2024.
Thomas Pfeiffer (DIS President) opened with a keynote on the determination of the applicable law. He thoroughly examined whether the infamous quote "[t]he realm of conflict of laws is a dismal swamp filled with quaking quagmires and inhabited by learned but eccentric professors who theorise about mysterious matters in a strange and incomprehensible jargon" is a truism and reflects current arbitral practice. Professor Pfeiffer was followed by Jennifer Bryant (Noerr), who delivered a thought-provoking keynote on arbitrability, focusing on the level of review of antitrust law disputes in setting aside proceedings.
In the first panel, moderated by Gustav Flecke-Giammarco (Seven Summits Arbitration), Rodolfo Dolce (Dolce Lauda), Michele Sabatini (ArbLit) and Florian Wagner (Gleiss Lutz) shared their invaluable insights into the challenge of enforcing awards in public courts from an Italian-German comparative law perspective. The second panel examined the interplay between expert determination proceedings and arbitration. It was moderated by Maria Theresia Roerig Corsini (BDC Legal) and featured Matthäus Mogendorf (Hengeler Mueller), Gregorio Pettazzi (Freshfields) and Reinmar Wolff (Marburg University).
To round off the afternoon, the upcoming reform of the tenth book of the German Code of Civil Procedure was presented by two representatives of the Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection, Nathalie Lendermann and Vincent Wächter. This presentation of the new rules for arbitration in Germany was one of the highlights of the day and particularly timely, providing deep insights into the draft reform bill published just a few days earlier on 10 June 2026.
The event was followed by a reception outside the FU Berlin lecture halls jointly sponsored by the DIS and Seven Summits Arbitration. The convivial speaker dinner at an Austrian restaurant in the nearby Charlottenburg district was also repeated, keeping alive the tradition from the prior edition of this event.
Riccardo Favaro and Elisa Bisi
