New York is the leading venue for international arbitration in the United States under the auspices of the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), surpassing all other US locations such as Miami, California and Texas in numbers of cases filed in 2016. The ICC Secretariat reported a record 966 new cases filed in 2016, an increase of 20 per cent over 2015. The cases involved 3,099 parties, up from 2,283 in 2015. Parties from the US represented 17.9 per cent of the total. 

Most frequently chosen

The US remained the third most frequently chosen country for the seat of ICC arbitration, after France and Switzerland. Eighty new cases were seated in the United States, an increase of 33 per cent over 2015. As in 2015, the United States surpassed the United Kingdom in number of new ICC cases. 

Market share

Consistent with the results in recent years, New York has by far the larger market share of the US cases. More than half of new ICC cases nationwide were seated in New York City (41), with the remainder scattered among California (10), Texas (10), Florida (7), Illinois (2), Washington (2), Washington DC (2), and one in each of Arizona, Hawaii, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wyoming. 

Trading places

In recent years New York has traded places with Singapore as the fourth or fifth most popular ICC arbitration site worldwide. In 2016, however, New York moved well ahead in the international rankings, again placing fourth (after Paris, London and Geneva) as an ICC venue, while Singapore dropped to seventh. In what the ICC stated was an anomaly due to an unusual influx of small multiparty cases, Belize City tied for fourth most popular venue in 2016. 

New York and English law

New York law and English law were the two most frequently chosen bodies of governing law in ICC international arbitration cases, and New York law was the premier choice for cases in which parties chose US laws to govern their disputes.