The Role of a Specialist Arbitration Court on the Example of the Court of Arbitration at the Association of Insurance Brokers in Poland with Its Seat in Wrocław

Abstract

The perceived crisis of the Polish judiciary is a significant opportunity for alternative dispute resolution methods and, above all, for arbitration. The science of civil law emphasises the numerous advantages of this alternative dispute resolution method. There is a noticeable trend in the arbitration judiciary towards specialisation of permanent arbitration courts in certain types of disputes, which allows for more efficient handling of disputes. In the pages of this academic and research article, the author isolates and analyses the rationale behind the need for specialisation within functioning permanent arbitration courts and then demonstrates the benefits of creating an arbitration court dedicated to the highly specialised brokerage industry. Specialised arbitration institutions have the advantage of providing better tailored – to specific sectors – arbitration rules with the aim of increasing the speed and efficiency of proceedings, as well as reducing their costs. The peculiarities of the brokerage industry, which touches on civil, commercial and administrative law with its issues, elude the traditional common courts. For these reasons, the Arbitration Court at the Association of Insurance Brokers in Poland, based in Wrocław, is a specialised arbitration court, offering its services mainly to participants in the insurance market, including insurance brokers in particular. Its functioning focused on the recognition of disputes in this narrow field of knowledge guarantees to the parties a professional approach to the resolution of their case, with a guaranteed knowledge of the nuances of the industry and an understanding of the rationale and needs of both parties to the dispute. Such a proposed approach to the topic (for the development of which dogmatic-legal, theoretical-legal methods, a review of literature and jurisprudence, as well as a case study were used) shows the advantages of the operation of a specialised court dedicated to the entities of the brokerage market, while on the other hand, it encourages a discussion on the legitimacy of profiling the activity of other permanent arbitration courts according to the needs and specifics of a given sector.