Litigation loves a relay race. One team builds the case, another delivers it, a third explains what just happened. Everyone gets a turn.
Clients, it seems, prefer a single address for the invoice.
They don’t say it like that, of course. They may talk about “continuity” or “alignment”. But what they mean is simple: don’t hand my problem around. If you understand it, you deal with it. Start to finish.
Duncan has spent a career indulging that preference.
The end of the relay race
There’s something theatrical about the traditional English split. Solicitors prepare, barristers perform. It’s elegant in the abstract, less so in a cross-border dispute involving multiple jurisdictions and a client who doesn’t care for the choreography.
Duncan’s model is more direct. Build the case, manage it, argue it.
It’s not a lifestyle upgrade. The workload multiplies. You’re drafting submissions, while shaping strategy, while preparing cross-examination. All hands on deck backstage while the client gets to sit back and enjoy the show.
The payoff? Coherence.
No translation layer between teams, no (very) last-minute handover where nuance and often patience, quietly dies. One narrative, held together by one person who can’t blame anyone else if it unravels.
Clients tend to like that.
Winning is still the strategy
There’s a minor industry devoted to the idea that legal practices are built through visibility, brand and carefully managed thought leadership.
Duncan’s version is less decorative. Win cases, consistently and the rest follows.
No grand theory, no hidden lever. Just a steady accumulation of outcomes that clients remember and come back for.
This isn’t to dismiss profile-building entirely. It helps to be known. But being known for winning tends to outperform being known for speaking about winning.
Over time, it compounds. A dispute in Texas becomes a relationship in East Asia, which becomes a foothold in Europe. Before long, you have something that looks like a global practice, built not through slogans but through problems solved.
Arbitration’s quiet advantage
Arbitration is often marketed as quicker, cheaper and more efficient. Like most marketing, this is somewhat true.
What it reliably offers is finality.
Litigation, particularly in England & Wales, has a fondness for longevity. Appeals proliferate, timelines stretch and certainty becomes an aspirational concept. Arbitration, by design, narrows the escape routes. You get an answer and more importantly, you keep it.
The most interesting shift is procedural. Tribunals are increasingly willing to cut through the noise. Summary determinations, long used with caution and only recently codified, are now being deployed with greater confidence.
Duncan points to cases worth tens of millions resolved within months. No hearing, no theatre, just a disagreement that was concluded efficiently.
It’s arbitration at its most effective. And, one suspects, slightly less enjoyable for those who came for the spectacle or to bulk up their time sheets.
Advocacy without the shouting
There’s a representation in film that successful advocacy is about aggression. Raised voices, dramatic pauses or the occasional intellectual ambush.
Duncan’s experience is less cinematic. The best advocates aren’t louder, they’re clearer.
Focus matters. A tribunal doesn’t need to be impressed, it needs to understand. The job is to take a mass of complex material and present it in a way that feels inevitable.
From the arbitrator’s chair, the lesson sharpens. Most of the procedural skirmishing lawyers indulge in barely registers. What stands out is efficiency. Get to the point, deal with the real issues and resist the urge to perform.
AI and the temptation to outsource thinking
AI has entered the disputes sphere with the usual fanfare. Faster drafting, smarter document review, a vague promise of immediate and complete transformation—results to be confirmed.
Duncan’s take is measured. It’s useful but it’s not a substitute.
The risk isn’t that the technology fails. It’s that lawyers become just competent enough with it to stop doing the hard thinking themselves. The first draft becomes the answer. The answer arrives before the question has properly formed.
In arbitration, where context is everything, that’s dangerous. Causing shifts across languages, cultures and commercial assumptions. No model, however impressive, quite captures all that.
The remedy is simple. Do the thinking first. Read properly. Maybe test your arguments on another human being who might disagree.
Behave like a lawyer first. The tech can come later to enhance that foundation.
The long game, played properly
There’s a final thread running through all of this: persistence.
Deliver good work, repeatedly and accept that it takes longer than you’d think. Resist the urge to mimic, develop your own voice and always show up as your authentic self.
And, ideally, win cases.