Documents in arbitral cases

Statements of case are considered to have been received once the Arbitration Board has received them by email. Any deadlines that apply will be based on the date of receipt, which means 11.59 pm at the latest. The office hours of the Board are thus irrelevant at far as deadlines are concerned.

According to applicable rules, hardcopies of statements of claim and statements of defence (all pleadings) must also be sent to the Board together with other documents serving as case exhibits (see below).

Digital submission
In order to reduce time spent on document management, the Arbitration Board has decided during a transitional period and as a general rule to allow submission of pleadings and supplementary documents only in electronic form by email or on a USB memory stick or similar until the relevant rules have been amended. The Board requires that all parties involved accept such submission, which means that an opposing party may demand to receive hardcopies of pleadings and supplementary documents. See the Arbitration Board rules on this.

Pleadings and supplementary documents that are submitted electronically must be sent in a single email but as separate files. Accompanying supplementary documents may either be sent together as one file or as several files, each file containing a case exhibit. The latter is recommended if there are only a few case exhibits. Files containing large amounts of data should be submitted on USB memory sticks rather than in several emails. Pleadings and exhibits must be appropriately named as well as numbered or lettered.

The Arbitration Board accepts the following file formats for texts and numbers: PDF (Adobe PDF format), DOCX (new Word format), DOC (older Word format), TXT (pure text format), XLSX (new Excel format) and XLS (old Excel format). Pictures may be submitted in JPG, PNG or TIFF format. Videos containing large amounts of data

It should be noted that it remains a requirement that case bundles and bundles of authorities be submitted as hardcopies before the main hearing (see below).

Materials that must be encrypted should be sent to sikkerpost@voldgift.dk.

Submission by ordinary mail 
If current rules are maintained, the following applies:
If the arbitral tribunal has one arbitrator, two hardcopies must be submitted: one copy for the arbitrator and one copy for the Secretariat.
If the arbitral tribunal is composed of three arbitrators, four hardcopies of pleadings must be submitted.
If the arbitral tribunal is composed of five arbitrators, six hardcopies of pleadings must be submitted.
In all cases, one copy of case exhibits must be submitted.

Four weeks before the main hearing, the parties must submit a collection of case exhibits or a case bundle. The number of copies required is equal to the number of arbitrators plus a copy for the Secretariat, ie two copies in cases with one arbitrator, four copies in cases with three arbitrators and six copies in cases with five arbitrators.

Once the case has been heard, a case protocol or award is prepared. The protocol or award will be sent to the parties to the case and to any parties on whom third-party notice has been served. In addition, the arbitral tribunal and any expert appraisers involved will receive a copy.

If a full award is given in a case heard by three or five arbitrators, the parties will be asked whether they will allow publication of the award in anonymised form in Kendelser om fast ejendom (Awards on real property) (KfE) or Tidsskrift for Bolig- og Byggeret (Journal of Housing and Building Law) (T:BB).

Documents in expert appraisal

Questions to experts and any related documents must be sent to the Secretariat in electronic form. Once the parties have reached agreement about the questions or a decision as to which questions may be asked, the Arbitration Board will send the questions and documents to the expert appraiser appointed in the case. The parties may also be asked to send the documents directly. The rules on expert appraisal issued by the Arbitration Board apply, not the provisions of the Danish Administration of Justice Act.

General practice is that the Arbitration Board may issue instructions concerning formats, including that questions to an expert must be submitted in a document and not as part of a long email thread, and that documents must be correctly designated. Only if the parties and the Arbitration Board agree on the matter and only until the Board’s case portal has been established may materials be uploaded to a portal operated by one of the parties. Otherwise documents may be forwarded by email or on a memory stick.

Material that has to be encrypted should be sent to sikkerpost@voldgift.dk.

Only if the questions to the expert and the related materials are very extensive should hardcopies be submitted, the number of copies being equivalent to the number of experts appointed in the case plus a copy to the Secretariat.

The parties may contact an expert directly regarding meeting times, dates, etc, but requests for information or documents submitted in the case must be made to the Secretariat.

After a meeting with the expert, the expert prepares minutes of the meeting as well as an expert report, progress report or supplementary report. According to current rules, the reports must be sent to the Secretariat, but in practice the Arbitration Board accepts the expert sending such reports directly to the parties.

The parties cannot expect to receive the expert’s report until the requested deposit has been paid to the Secretariat. This may be a reason for some experts to prefer to send their reports through the Secretariat.

Archive

The Arbitration Board keeps documents from concluded arbitral cases in physical form for five years, after which they are destroyed – with the exception of the award. Case exhibits are destroyed immediately upon conclusion of the case.

The Arbitration Board keeps documents from concluded expert appraisal and expert determination procedures for three years, after which they are destroyed.

The Board does not archive documents from cases in which the Board has been asked to propose an expert for a case to be heard in an ordinary court of law. Such documents are destroyed shortly after conclusion of the case.

The vast majority of documents in recent cases are available in electronic form and the time during which documents must be kept in the archives is expected to be reduced in the near future.

There is no legal obligation for the Arbitration Board to keep documents from concluded cases in its archives for a particular number of years. The Arbitration Board is not bound by the rules applying to government institutions, since the Board is a private enterprise.