James Castello, deputy Chairman of the LCIA, has joined Arbitration Chambers as a full-time arbitrator, following his retirement on 30 September from King & Spalding.

A US national, Mr Castello has practised law for 37 years and has spent the last 15 years focused on counsel work with King & Spalding, where he was a founding partner of its Paris office.  During these years, he represented parties in both commercial and investment arbitrations. Representative cases involved disputes arising from curtailment of gas supply to an LNG facility; a frustrated multi-use urban development project; a disagreement among partners in a gas production project; a government-to-government conflict over an oil pipeline agreement; disputed control of an oil refinery; unpaid manufacture of major equipment for a deep water port; and a road project in Africa.

Mr. Castello has also served as tribunal chair or co-arbitrator on numerous occasions and has participated in arbitrations under the ICC, LCIA, UNCITRAL (PCA), VIAC, AAA, and SCC rules as well as in several ad hoc proceedings. Prior to joining King & Spalding, Mr Castello worked for a number of years with other leading firms in Paris, Vienna and Washington DC, as well as spending six years working in senior legal positions in the Clinton Administration, including as the Deputy Counsel to the President, at the White House, and Associate Deputy Attorney General at the Justice Department.

Mr Castello has acted, for over two decades, as a private sector advisor on the US delegations to UNCITRAL’s Arbitration Working Groups.  He also serves as an Executive Committee Vice Chair of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration, where he sits on ITA’s Rule of Law Task Force; he is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Vienna International Arbitration Center; and he serves as Co-Chair of CILS’ biennial Salzburg Arbitration Symposium.  He began his legal career, after obtaining degrees from Yale and Berkeley, with clerkships at the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal in The Hague, and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Mr Castello is globally recognized by the community, including in the leading peer-review surveys, as a first-rate arbitration practitioner. Eric A. Schwartz, a successful American and French independent arbitrator based in New York, commented that "James is an outstanding arbitration lawyer with whom I worked closely on multiple arbitration matters over the course of more than a decade. Thorough, wise and talented in every way that matters in our field, James is also a wonderful person and colleague. Freed of the conflicts of big firm practice, I am sure that he will be in great demand, as he should be, as an independent arbitrator. His move to Arbitration Chambers is wonderful news for the international arbitration community to which he has already made so many contributions."

In a similar vein, Doak Bishop, a senior partner in the international arbitration group at King & Spalding, said, “I very much regret that James has chosen to retire from the firm, but happily he is not retiring from the arbitration community.  I have enjoyed working closely with James over the past decade.  He is an excellent lawyer from whose thoughts and work I have greatly benefitted.  I’m highly confident that he will be an excellent arbitrator and much in demand.  I wish him the very best in this new endeavor.”

On behalf of Arbitration Chambers, Gavin Denton, Head of Chambers, stated “We are delighted that James has joined Arbitration Chambers, which continues to attract the very best full-time international arbitrators globally. In an ever-changing market, I have no doubt James will be enormously successful, as he personifies the attributes most important in an arbitrator: quality, experience and integrity.”

Arbitration Chambers was established in 2012 in Hong Kong, and expanded to London in 2017, to New York early in 2020, and to Singapore (as Arbitration Chambers Tras Street) in 2023.  Our members all work as full-time arbitrators/neutrals and do not undertake counsel work, and they all operate separately and independently from one another.  This reduces potential conflicts of interest, which can arise for arbitrators affiliated with law firms or traditional barristers’ chambers. Further details about Arbitration Chambers can be found at www.arbchambers.com

If you have any questions about the expertise or availability of James Castello, or any questions about Arbitration Chambers, please contact our practice team at practiceteam@arbchambers.com or our Chambers Director, Sarah Lancaster, at sarah.lancaster@arbchambers.com.