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Reading the 2026 Risk Signals

  • Writer: Aişe Gül Akkoyun
    Aişe Gül Akkoyun
  • Feb 5
  • 3 min read

What the major law firms' 2026 arbitration forecasts agree on, and why the agreement itself is the interesting part.


Background

Every January, a cluster of major international law firms publish forward-looking notes on arbitration trends for the year ahead. Read individually, each is a piece of client-facing commentary. Read together, the 2026 crop — from Freshfields, Cleary Gottlieb, Baker McKenzie, Charles River Associates, A&O Shearman and Crowell & Moring, among others — functions as something closer to a crowdsourced forecast, and the areas where independently authored notes converge are worth taking seriously as signals rather than marketing.


Where the forecasts agree

Five themes recur across nearly all of the 2026 notes surveyed. States are asserting firmer control over sectors treated as strategically sensitive — mining, critical minerals, technology — often justified expressly on national-security grounds, a pattern this archive has already documented in the Jupiter v. Nigeria and Sonora lithium disputes. Tax and tariff measures, increasingly retroactive in character, are becoming a central catalyst for high-stakes cross-border disputes rather than a background irritant. Armed conflict, at what commentators describe as its most complex level since the Second World War, is expected to drive a further surge in conflict-related commercial and investor-state arbitration, building on the Exxon/Sakhalin pattern already visible in Russia-linked disputes. Sovereignty and boundary disputes — over contested territory, the deep seabed, and even outer space — are flagged as an emerging driver specifically for energy, extractives, and infrastructure investors. And sanctions exposure remains stubbornly high, with one tracked figure putting nearly a quarter of all ICC cases in early 2024 as sanctions-related.


Why convergence is itself the data point

Individually, each of these predictions could be dismissed as a firm talking its own book — steering clients toward the practice areas it wants more instructions in. But when six independently authored notes, produced by firms with different client bases and different competitive incentives, converge on substantially the same five themes, the convergence is harder to explain away as marketing alone. It suggests these firms are observing a broadly similar signal in their actual instruction flow, even if none of them discloses the underlying data.


What would be worth measuring

  • Whether the actual 2026 caseload, once it can be observed with a lag, bears out the predicted concentration in critical minerals, tax/tariff, conflict-related, and sanctions-linked disputes

  • Whether firm forecasts in prior years have had any measurable predictive accuracy, tested retrospectively against subsequent caseload data

  • Whether valuation and quantum disputes — flagged by several notes as intensifying — are measurably harder to resolve than liability disputes in the current environment, and if so by how much

  • Whether the volume of forecast convergence itself correlates with genuine caseload shifts, or mainly with a shared set of headline geopolitical narratives that firms independently latch onto

The open question

Treating a cluster of law-firm forecasts as a dataset rather than as marketing collateral is a modest methodological move, but it raises a real question: is there value in systematically tracking how much these annual forecasts agree with each other, year over year, as a leading indicator of where the caseload is actually heading — or is convergence simply evidence that major firms read the same news and reach for the same five words?


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