William Kirtley

What Remained of $350 Million

Claims and counterclaims approaching $350 million entered an SCC arbitration governed by Uzbek law. William Kirtley’s client left with an award against it of less than $2 million.

The proceeding concerned a publicly listed Southeast Asian petrochemical company and an industrial record large enough to threaten the company itself. Delay penalties, disruption damages, project schedules, engineering evidence, and competing accounts of responsibility accumulated through three and a half years of arbitration before the final award issued in 2022.

William Kirtley and Aceris Law defended the company. Global Arbitration Review reported that the claims and counterclaims approached $350 million. When the tribunal ruled, essentially all claims against the client had failed. The amount awarded against it was under $2 million.

From Petrochemicals to Digital Assets

In another defense, a Canadian client faced $131 million in counterclaims while pursuing its own claims. In that multiparty ICC arbitration under English law, Aceris obtained full damages for the client and defeated every counterclaim.

The claimant-side record reaches the same scale from the opposite direction. An ICDR arbitration under New York law concerning investments in blockchain technology produced an award of $35 million, plus interest and all arbitration costs. An LCIA supply dispute governed by English law yielded $28.7 million, plus interest and costs. In a SIAC arbitration over construction of a desalination plant in Oman, the client recovered full damages and costs. An Austrian investor recovered all damages and costs from an East African state entity in an LCIA arbitration over a smart-card supply contract.

A West African company obtained partial and final awards in a Swiss-law ICC dispute concerning construction of a cement plant, including seventy percent of its costs. A Croatian industrial company prevailed in a Geneva-seated ICC arbitration over refinery piping works, the tribunal fully upholding its claims, with the Italian respondent bearing most of the arbitration costs. A Hong Kong company secured full victory and costs in an ICC proceeding over multimillion-dollar cryptocurrency losses. A state-controlled entity recovered approximately €26 million in a cement-industry arbitration. In a World Bank-financed infrastructure dispute governed by Angolan law, a state client obtained full damages and most of its costs while defeating every counterclaim.

Aceris also represented the Maldives against a Dubai contractor that failed to deliver ventilators during the COVID-19 pandemic. A 2024 award at the Maldives International Arbitration Centre ordered repayment for the undelivered equipment, liquidated damages, interest, and reimbursement of the state’s arbitration costs.

Across those proceedings, Kirtley used project schedules, engineering evidence, financial models, contracts, and governing law to prove the claims and defenses each tribunal had to decide.

What the Technical Record Must Prove

Kirtley’s matters move through petrochemical facilities, cement plants, electricity networks, desalination works, aviation leases, mining rights, shipping cargoes, digital assets, and algorithmic trading. They have proceeded under the rules of the ICC, ICSID, UNCITRAL, LCIA, SCC, SIAC, ICDR, HKIAC, DIAC, JAMS, the PCA, and other arbitral forums, applying laws drawn from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas.

Kirtley’s construction and commercial cases require tribunals to determine where a schedule failed, which contractual actor controlled the cause, whether a financial model measures the promised counterfactual, and how the governing law assigns responsibility. Expert evidence supplies the engineering or financial analysis; counsel connects that analysis to the contractual issue the tribunal must decide.

M’Bahiakro

Long before Kirtley argued delay, disruption, and sovereign-risk claims, he spent twenty-seven months learning the distance between a project plan and the conditions required to carry it out.

After graduating from Harvard in 1997, he joined the Peace Corps and went to the rural prefecture of M’Bahiakro in Côte d’Ivoire. His assignment was urban environmental management. The work was municipal and physical: urban renewal, waste-management systems, infrastructure, and irrigation projects undertaken with Ivorian public entities and regional and municipal governments, in partnership with the United States Embassy, the French Embassy, and UNAIDS.

Engineers, local officials, international organizations, budgets, equipment, weather, and public need had to meet in the same place. During his service, a coup overthrew the government. Kirtley later described a period in which problems arose constantly and solutions had to be found within a culture and administrative setting different from his own. He left with working knowledge of Bambara and Baoulé and a lasting respect for cross-cultural communication under pressure.

That work later informed Kirtley’s understanding of construction disputes involving delay, force majeure, employer risk, prolongation costs, variation orders, and disputed completion certificates. He had already seen how budgets, equipment, public bodies, and unforeseen events could determine whether an infrastructure project succeeded.

Justice Cannot Be Too Slow

Two assignments inside the United Nations system showed Kirtley how delay affects people waiting for courts and tribunals to act.

Kirtley served as a legal consultant in the Office of the Prosecutor at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, working in the Military I Unit on the prosecution of senior army commanders alleged to bear responsibility for the 1994 genocide. He also worked as a consultant to the United Nations Department of Political Affairs, drafting the Repertoire of the Practice of the Security Council, the constitutional and procedural guide to the Council’s proceedings.

His lasting observation from Arusha concerned time. The people affected by the tribunal’s work, he recalled, were unimpressed by its pace and doubted that it was addressing their problems. "Justice cannot be too slow," he concluded.

Kirtley later identified delay as a recurring problem in arbitration, where evidence can weaken, projects remain frozen, capital stays trapped, and proceedings can outlive business plans and political administrations.

Two Legal Traditions

Kirtley, a Franco-American dual national, was educated for disputes in which no single country’s habits can be assumed.

At Harvard, he graduated magna cum laude, made the Dean’s List every semester, and wrote his honors thesis on the history of empiricism — the study of how claims become knowledge. At Columbia Law School, he was named a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and received the Dorsey & Whitney Prize and the Tony Patiño Fellowship for outstanding character. He then earned a Maitrise en droit with honors from Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Those degrees trained him in the two legal traditions that international arbitration often requires counsel to reconcile. American common-law training emphasizes adversarial testing, precedent, witness examination, and a developed factual record. French civil-law training brings different habits of pleading, proof, contractual interpretation, and judicial reasoning. A tribunal may include members educated in both traditions, apply the law of a third country, sit in a fourth, and hear evidence created in several more.

Kirtley is admitted in New York and Washington, D.C., and is an inactive avocat at the Paris bar. He works in English and French, has professional ability in Spanish and basic Arabic, and retains the Bambara and Baoulé he learned in West Africa. That range permits closer work with the source record and a sharper ear for the point at which translation begins to alter legal meaning.

An Apprenticeship in Landmark Cases

At Shearman & Sterling’s Global Dispute Resolution Practice in Paris, he worked at the outset of Hulley Enterprises Ltd. v. Russian Federation, the UNCITRAL proceeding at the heart of the Yukos affair. Around it came energy, construction, shipping, mining, technology, and joint-venture disputes under a wide range of national laws.

At Salans, now Dentons, his caseload included Rumeli Telekom v. Kazakhstan, Lemire v. Ukraine, and Rompetrol v. Romania, alongside a treaty claim concerning Poland, an aircraft-lease arbitration involving an Angolan company, a dispute concerning modernization of an African state’s customs agency, and construction of a sulfuric-acid plant in Turkey.

He then became Of Counsel at Lazareff Le Bars, the Paris boutique founded by eminent French arbitrator Serge Lazareff, where he served as co-lead counsel in the first reported investment-treaty arbitration concerning Belarus and in an UNCITRAL dispute with a United Nations agency. As a partner at DK AARPI, he added ICC, ICSID, UNCITRAL, and SIAC matters, began sitting as an arbitrator, and served as an expert for the World Bank Group on arbitration-related civil-procedure reform.

His later treaty and sovereign work has included successful ICSID proceedings involving Kazakhstan and Ukraine, a successful defense for Türkiye, a successful UNCITRAL treaty arbitration involving a French pharmaceutical company and Poland, counsel for Barotseland, and work on a human-rights legal team before the International Court of Justice.

By the time he founded Aceris Law in 2014, Kirtley had worked in both large international teams and specialist boutiques. He designed Aceris to keep senior lawyers close to the record.

Scholarship on Access, Evidence, and Enforcement

Kirtley’s scholarship moved from the duties states owe to the practical questions that determine whether a claimant can bring a case, obtain evidence, and enforce an award.

While still at Columbia, he published "The Tampa Incident" in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, examining a state’s asylum obligations under international law. In 2009, he wrote on the transfer of treaty claims and treaty shopping in investor–State disputes. That same year, he published on bringing claims and enforcing arbitral awards involving sub-Saharan African states and parties, including the effects of sovereign immunity, asset location, local procedure, and political conditions.

He later examined United States discovery under 28 U.S.C. § 1782 for foreign arbitrations, the status of the Report of the Executive Directors on the ICSID Convention, security for costs when an impecunious claimant relies on third-party funding, OHADA arbitration, the clean-hands doctrine, and the French courts’ public-policy review of arbitral awards.

These publications address forum access, evidence gathering, security for costs, and enforcement of arbitral awards. Kirtley has also taught at the University of Paris X and Paris II Panthéon-Assas, served in editorial roles, and advised the World Bank on alternative-dispute-resolution legislation.

Aceris Law and Capped Stage Fees

Kirtley founded Aceris Law in Geneva in 2014 to address two recurring barriers in international arbitration: conflicts and cost.

A global firm with thousands of lawyers may be unable to act against a bank, multinational company, or state because another office represents a related interest. Its overhead and hourly billing can make the eventual cost of a multiyear arbitration impossible to predict. A smaller specialist firm is less likely to be conflicted out by another office, keeps senior lawyers closer to the record, and can price the work by stage rather than accumulated hours.

Kirtley made that design explicit. Aceris caps fees for defined stages of most disputes and commits the work required within each cap, giving clients a fixed budget at the outset. Clients receive the record, remain involved to the degree they choose, and make every key decision that affects their case. "We share absolutely everything with them," Kirtley has said. The firm uses secure technology and artificial intelligence to accelerate research and document review while retaining human verification wherever accuracy matters.

Aceris also promotes from within lawyers who proved themselves as trainees on live arbitration work, creating a team trained to the firm’s own working methods. Its lawyers are fluent in English and French and work across Spanish, German, Arabic, Serbo-Croat, Greek, Italian, and Russian.

Aceris represents states, public entities, listed companies, infrastructure businesses, investors, and individuals. The firm is headquartered in Geneva and handles proceedings connected to Paris, London, Singapore, Washington, and the locations of the underlying projects and witnesses.

The Open Library

Aceris publishes a multilingual library for businesses, investors, and states that use international arbitration. The resources include procedural guides, a dictionary of arbitration terminology, searchable treaty databases, tools for tracking deadlines and estimating when awards may issue, a meta-search engine spanning leading arbitration sources, and model Requests for Arbitration and Answers under a range of arbitral rules.

The library gives businesses, investors, and states practical guidance before and during a dispute.

Holding a Sovereign’s Courts to Account

Bachar Kiwan’s dispute with Kuwait required Kirtley and the Aceris team to prove one of the most difficult breaches in investment law: denial of justice.

International tribunals do not sit as ordinary appellate courts over national judges. A mistaken decision, even a serious one, generally remains within the domestic system. The claimant must establish proceedings so egregious, incoherent, biased, or fundamentally unfair that they cross the boundary into international responsibility.

Aceris Law reported that the unpublished award, issued on March 10, 2025, addressed a criminal conviction entered against Kiwan in his absence for human smuggling, even though the person allegedly smuggled out of Kuwait was Kiwan himself. According to Aceris, the tribunal concluded that a legal framework designed to protect the object of trafficking could not coherently be used to convict that person as the trafficker. The tribunal found the conviction sufficiently extreme to constitute denial of justice and identified due-process defects in litigation over Kiwan’s media enterprise and irregularities in a related defamation proceeding.

Kirtley’s team organized separate domestic records into a single treaty case without asking the tribunal to become a court of general appeal. The tribunal formally held Kuwait in breach of the treaty’s fair-and-equitable-treatment obligation, including denial of justice, and refused Kuwait’s request for more than $6.6 million in arbitration costs.

Kirtley as Arbitrator

Kirtley has served as sole arbitrator, co-arbitrator, and presiding arbitrator in administered and ad hoc proceedings involving construction, manufacturing, real estate, commercial contracts, and investor–State disputes. In that role, he evaluates both parties’ records, protects each party’s opportunity to be heard, and participates in decisions subject to later scrutiny. He appears on panels and rosters maintained by SIAC, the LCIA, VIAC, DIAC, and the USCIB, the ICC’s national committee for the United States.

His independent practice creates fewer conflicts with major companies and states. Kirtley says an arbitrator should decide from the contract, governing law, and evidence rather than seek compromise for its own sake. He also aims to issue awards promptly. Subject to due process and the coordination required by a three-member tribunal, his stated goal is to issue an award within two months after the final hearing. He conducts virtual hearings without an added fee and makes experienced tribunal secretaries available.

The public Zeph Investments award records Kirtley’s work as a member of a three-person tribunal. Zeph sought more than $198 billion from Australia under the investment chapter of the ASEAN–Australia–New Zealand Free Trade Area and appointed Kirtley. Gabrielle Kaufmann-Kohler presided, with Donald McRae appointed by Australia.

The jurisdictional question turned on whether Zeph had "made" a protected investment—the distinction between owning an asset and committing economic value. After a three-day hearing at the Peace Palace in The Hague, the tribunal examined treaty text, corporate records, expert evidence, and tax and regulatory arguments. It issued its award within a year and unanimously declined jurisdiction.

Kirtley joined the tribunal’s conclusion that the party appointing him had not established jurisdiction.