London as the World's Legal Center? 60% of litigants are foreign

London has over the years developed as a world financial center and has so doing, turned its service industry into a major revenue earner. Lawyers have played a big role in this by advising on complex transactions all over the world. What is a little surprising is the recent news that of the litigants in London's commercial courts, 60% of litigants are from outside of the UK. Of course, a good number of those are African and Nigerian.

In arbitration, the London Court of International Arbitration's 2012 statistics so that 84% of parties were non UK. 5.5% of that was African and Nigeria accounted for 36.4% of the African total. I sometimes wonder whether we do not insist on Nigerian seated arbitration because of lack of knowledge or because our courts can be blatantly  unfriendly to arbitration (Anyway things are changing on this front. See the earlier post on a recent CA decision). We've got quite a ways to go ...