The revised ICC Rules of Arbitration entered into force on 1 June 2026 and govern every arbitration commenced on or after that date, unless the parties agree otherwise. The revision arrives at a moment of heavy use: 881 new cases were registered in 2025, and the aggregate amount in dispute across pending cases reached USD 299 billion.
For companies, funds and State entities in Latin America and the United States that arbitrate regularly under the ICC banner, the useful question is not how ambitious the reform is. It is whether the clauses signed last year still produce the procedure their drafters had in mind. In several respects they no longer do.
The Terms of Reference are gone, replaced by an initial case management conference that the tribunal must hold within thirty days of receiving the file. The consequences run further than the loss of a familiar document. New claims are now cut off at that conference (Article 25), and the six-month award deadline, which used to run from the signature of the Terms of Reference, is set instead by the President of the Court against the procedural timetable (Article 34). Both changes push work forward, onto the Request and the Answer.
Early determination enters the text of the Rules
Article 30 allows any party to apply for the early determination of one or more claims or defences on two grounds: that they are manifestly without merit, or that they are manifestly outside the tribunal’s jurisdiction. The tribunal decides in its discretion whether to let the application proceed and, if it does, adopts the procedure it considers appropriate after consulting the parties.
Counsel trained in the United States will recognise the shape of the tool and should be careful with the analogy. The threshold is neither the plausibility standard applied on a motion to dismiss nor the absence of a genuine dispute of material fact under Rule 56. “Manifestly” is a deliberately narrow word, and the practice developed under the 2021 Guidance Note, which already contemplated the mechanism without codifying it, suggests tribunals will grant these applications rarely. For civil-law practitioners in the region the novelty runs in the opposite direction: the closest domestic instrument is usually the excepción previa, confined to procedural defences, and partial disposal on the merits before the evidentiary phase has no clear counterpart in most local codes. Both groups will need to calibrate expectations, and respondents in particular should not assume that a weak claim can be removed early at modest cost.
Two accelerated tracks instead of one
The Expedited Procedure Provisions now sit in Appendix V, and the threshold for their automatic application rises to USD 4 million for arbitration agreements concluded on or after 1 June 2026. The earlier tiers survive for older clauses: USD 3 million for agreements concluded between 1 January 2021 and 31 May 2026, and USD 2 million for those concluded between 1 March 2017 and the end of 2020. A party that has not turned its mind to the point may find that a USD 3.5 million dispute under a clause signed next month is decided by a sole arbitrator appointed by the Court, notwithstanding express wording calling for three.
Appendix VI is entirely new. The Highly Expedited Arbitration Provisions apply only where all parties agree (Article 33), and they compress the proceeding aggressively. The claimant files a combined Request and Statement of Claim accompanied, so far as possible, by its evidence. The respondent has twenty days to identify itself and comment on the appointment of the sole arbitrator, and thirty days to file its Answer and Statement of Defence together with any counterclaim. No extension of these periods is available unless the parties agree. Joinder and consolidation are excluded. The sole arbitrator holds the initial CMC within seven days of receiving the file and must render the award within three months of that conference.
Three months is achievable only where the case has been built before filing. The track suits distribution, agency and supply disputes resting on a documentary record. It is a poor fit for construction claims, for any dispute in which document production matters, and for contracts inside a group structure where a joinder application is foreseeable. Because the mechanism is opt-in, the choice has to be made when the contract is negotiated, at a point when nobody knows what the dispute will look like. That is an uncomfortable exercise, and it argues for reserving the highly expedited route to contracts of limited value and predictable subject matter.
Disclosure tightens, and the parties acquire an obligation of their own
Article 12(2) instructs the prospective arbitrator to resolve any doubt about whether to disclose in favour of disclosure. Article 12(4) balances that instruction by providing that a disclosure does not, by itself, establish a lack of independence or impartiality, which should temper the reflex of treating every disclosure as the seed of a challenge. The continuing duty survives in Article 12(3).
The change with the most immediate effect on counsel is Article 12(5). Each party must now submit to the Secretariat, with its Request, Answer, Request for Joinder or request for an extension to answer, a list of the persons and entities it believes arbitrators should consider, together with the reasons. The obligation to disclose third-party funding arrangements is retained in Article 12(6), and Article 12(8) adds an express confidentiality duty for arbitrators, subject to the public domain, party agreement, applicable law and the protection of legal rights.
The list requirement deserves attention in this region. Ownership structures built on family holdings, trusts and non-resident vehicles do not always surface through a name search, and the arbitration community in several Latin American jurisdictions is small enough that repeat appointments are a fact of life rather than an anomaly. Compiling the list is work for the client and counsel together, and it now falls due at filing rather than after constitution.
Interim relief, awards and administration
Appendix IV introduces preliminary orders in emergency arbitrator proceedings. A party may ask the emergency arbitrator to direct another party not to frustrate the purpose of the application, and that request may be made and decided without notice to the other side. The Secretariat transmits the application to the other parties only once the emergency arbitrator has ruled, and the emergency arbitrator must then give them a prompt opportunity to be heard. The provision is aimed at asset dissipation. Whether a national court will lend enforcement support to an order issued ex parte by a private adjudicator is a separate question governed by local law, and the answer is not uniform across Latin America or, for that matter, across United States district courts.
Several other adjustments are administrative and welcome. Awards may be signed electronically and in counterparts, and notified in electronic form (Article 38(1)). The Court’s scrutiny now extends to the validity and enforceability of the award, in addition to the mandatory law of the seat (Article 37(3)). The Court may allow a truncated tribunal to continue after the last hearing or the last substantive submission rather than only after the proceedings have closed (Article 16(5)). Tribunal secretaries are regulated for the first time in Article 44, and must meet the same independence, impartiality and confidentiality requirements as arbitrators.
What the revision left out
The 2026 Rules say nothing about the use of artificial intelligence by counsel or tribunals, nothing about the recovery of third-party funding costs, and nothing about the environmental footprint of proceedings. ICC has routed those subjects to task forces and practice notes rather than to the text of the Rules. Parties who want a position on any of them still have to negotiate it into the arbitration agreement or raise it early enough to see it reflected in Procedural Order No. 1.
What to do now
Clauses concluded before 1 June 2026 keep their expedited threshold, so the immediate task is a review of templates rather than an amendment programme across existing contracts. Any clause going out this quarter calls for a decision on the higher threshold, and, where a three-member tribunal is genuinely intended for mid-sized disputes, for an express opt-out from the Expedited Procedure Provisions. Whether the transaction merits the highly expedited route is a separate question, and one that should be answered on the basis of how the contract is likely to fail rather than on a general preference for speed.
For disputes already in preparation, the practical consequence of the reform is that work traditionally done in the weeks following constitution of the tribunal has moved forward. With the claims cut-off now at the initial case management conference and the award clock running from a timetable fixed shortly afterwards, the quality of the Request has become the principal variable a claimant controls.