Vidar attorneys represented a large telecommunications equipment company in a dispute with a former joint venture partner. The case involved a potential liability of hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to third parties. The joint venture agreement required that the case be presented to an arbitration panel under the rules of the International Chamber of Commerce.
Challenges:
The joint venture agreement was signed more than 20 years before the dispute. Many of the individuals involved in negotiating and writing the agreement were unavailable at the time of the dispute, could not remember any specifics of the agreement, or had died before the dispute arose.
The joint venture agreement was also written by many different people, was revised many times, and referred to schedules that were never actually drafted. The final agreement was hundreds of pages and contained numerous contradictions and inconsistencies.
Because the agreement was written so long before the dispute, our attorneys were told that no documents from that time period still existed from any party.
Outcomes:
Experience and instinct led our attorneys to a cache of documents that were stored and forgotten years earlier. These documents included critical information that was key to the case.
Once the documents were discovered, the attorneys for the joint venture partner spent a great deal of time and effort and used multiple strategies in order to suppress the documents and prevent our attorneys from using the documents. Our attorneys anticipated these tactics and defeated them.
Following arbitration, our client reached a successful settlement in the case.