International Arbitration in Germany, Cultural Gaps, and the Work Experience Advantage with Marlene Wette

Welcome to Studying Law Around the World. I'm Claudio Claus. In each episode, I talk with lawyers, law students, and professors from different parts of the world to talk about legal education, careers, and what the profession looks like in real life. We talk about the hard parts, the surprises, and the decisions that shaped their paths. Whether you're planning to study abroad, thinking about working in another legal system, or just curious about how law works around the world, this podcast is for you. Today I'll be interviewing Merlina Vetta, she's a lawyer in Germany and has a very, very interesting story and background connecting an LLM International Trade and Investment law from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She has very interesting projects all throughout Europe. She has worked at a law firm in Austria and Vienna. She also graduated from law school in Germany. Very, very interested to learn more about your story. Marlena, thank you so much for making the time to be in the podcast today. Thank you so much for having me, I'm really glad to be here. Absolutely. And to start off our conversation, I'd love for you to tell us a little more about yourself and and about your current role. Of course. So I work as a senior associate at the law firm called Bodenheimer. We are based in Germany and we have a focus on national and international dispute resolution. And within that practice I specifically focus on cross-border litigation and international arbitration. And it's a field I'm genuinely passionate about. So I'm very much looking forward to talking about it today. Fantastic. And something that I always explore here in the podcast is about studying law around the world is the name of the podcast, as you know. So I'm always interested in learning about how how becoming a lawyer works, but most interested about people's careers and how they got you where they are they're at. And I've I've looked up on your resume as I was preparing for this interview that you trained in Germany and later completed an LM, as I had mentioned in Amsterdam. So I wanted to ask you a little more about that part of your story and what first attracted you to international arbitration and cross-border disputes. Honestly, the desire to work internationally was there from the very beginning, and it was one of the reasons I actually wanted to study law in the 1st place. And I knew early on that I wanted to pursue a career that would take me beyond one country or one legal system, one way of thinking about legal problems. And at the university I studied in Heidelberg in the South of Germany, I had the opportunity to participate in the Phillips C Jessup Moot Court. It's a public international law focused mood court. And this experience really opened my eyes to this fascinating, highly specific field of law with its own rules, its own case law, its own culture really. And from there it for me, it came together very naturally. International arbitration sits at this unique intersection of law, commerce, different cultures, different legal systems, and it's tied everything that I was genuinely interested in together for me. So the choice then became very clear to pursue international arbitration. That's amazing and, and very interesting. I, I remember looking it up when I was preparing for this interview that also Heidelberg is one of the oldest universities in, in today's Germany. It's from the pits. I was very, very surprised, especially growing up in Latin America and now living in Canada where, where the so-called new world, there are so many institutions. Our oldest institutions here are, you know, from the, I don't know, bids are heard that it's so it's very interesting to see the history that lives on in these institutions. And I appreciate you sharing a little more about, you know, this desire that that you had early on and that you cultivated. So I understand that early in your career you worked with arbitration teams in different jurisdictions, including in Austria. And I, I wanted to ask you what are some of the most important lessons that you took from those experiences and what, what was it like to adapt to a new professional environment? I would say the biggest lesson that I took from those early experiences in working different teams in different law firms in in particular abroad, is something that I still believe in very deeply today, that there are no two legal teams that work in the same way. Every environment has something to teach you and there's a different approach to a case strategy, a different internal culture of the law firm, different workflow that they follow. And I believe it's genuinely always worth paying attention to those differences because it can always teach you something. And then specifically in cross-border work, which is where I was more involved in, in the arbitration context, there is an additional dimension to that. And that is that if you're going to deal effectively with clients, counterparties or also colleagues from different parts of the world, you also need to genuinely understand the differences in legal culture and legal thinking. And the best way to develop that understanding and that skill of understanding it is in my belief, direct exposure. And therefore there is no substitute for having actually worked in a different legal system. Although I want to admit that the Austrian legal system is not that far off from the German legal system. But there's one thing I'd like to emphasise, especially for listeners early in their career. And that is that the factor of how much you get out of an experience of working in a different environment, in a different team is almost entirely up to you, I believe, whether you're a student on an internship or working as a research assistant, or assigned as an associate to a particular case, even in a specific project. Only the people who truly benefit from that experience, in my point of view, are the ones who are really leaning into that experience. And that can be by offering your support, by asking questions, by finding ways to get involved in meetings and getting close to the actual work and the actual matters. And in my experience, showing curiosity in in new work environment will always help you to be quickly involved and really learn from the people that are working on the cases and also gain experience from the way that they're working on. It I appreciate that thought. I appreciate the early advice here to your listeners. And I also understand that your work involves disputes that are often governed by different legal systems, also different places of arbitration around the world. And I wanted to ask you, how does working across different systems then shape the way that you approach this legal problems? I understand that answer is grounded on on work experience, but also in university research and experience that you've undergone over the years. I think it fundamentally broadens the way of your legal thinking, and I mean that in the most practical sense. When you work with one legal system, there is a natural tendency that you treat this system as your own framework and then also as the default. That's just the way that you've been legally trained and working across legal systems sometimes dismantles that assumption very quickly of this is how you should do it. And then you realize that the same legal problem can be approached in very different ways and that the obvious solution that you arrive to from your own legal background is sometimes definitely not the only solution that can be put to the table. And the more you are open and the more you are creative, it's in my opinion, it will help you to see more than one side to a legal complex. And this connects directly to something I mentioned earlier about understanding legal culture. You develop in the course of your work a sensitivity to how your counterparts or even opposing counsel and in particular you're arbitrators are likely to reason. If you have if you are involved in an arbitration and you have a tribunal that is combining different legal backgrounds, it is really necessary that you have a sensitivity and also a strategic approach as to how you can tie in these different legal backgrounds and still find a convincing argument that is in the end going to work in your favour. This challenge keeps you curious. I believe every new legal system has a particular lens through which it examines a certain problem or certain consolation. And if you're curious to learn about these things, broadens your skill set, it broadens your horizon, and it keeps you creative in finding solutions. Amazing, thank you for sharing that. It's, it's always interesting to see the, the different perspectives that lawyers bring in this, in this podcast. But I really appreciate especially the, the lived experience that, that you just shared of, of how that comes about really when it comes to, to real life, to actually presenting in front of an arbitration panel and, and all of that. I understand you have worked as council and, and also as a secretary to arbitral tribunals and also as an arbitrator. Well, how do you sing arbitration from those different perspectives, from different roles has influenced the way that you handle a case nowadays. I believe it's extremely valuable because every role gives you a very different vantage point on the same problem, on the same process. And learning from these experience makes you better in each of the other perspectives that you can take. I believe so when you're acting as a party representative, your entire perspective is very naturally anchored to the perspective of your client. So your goal is to build the most compelling case possible and convince the tribunal and this is the world that you're operating in. But if you set also on the other side, and if you have seen cases from the perspective of an arbitrator, you start to develop a sharp instinct for what is actually going to land with a tribunal and what is maybe not. And of course it's you and never have the certainty, but you start to understand more intuitively what the tribunal is looking for, creates doubt, what creates conviction, and also how the process within the arbitral tribunal might develop throughout an arbitration in its whole. And I believe that this makes you more effective as an advocate. In addition to that, if you want to become involved as an arbitrator yourself, being a tribunal secretary is one of the ways of gaining experience and arbitration that goes beyond party representation because there is a very deliberate, deliberative process in arbitration that is for very good reasons, largely opaque to the outside world. So it's very difficult to have an inside of how do these debates unfold, what is discussed, who is convinced by by what really. And if you get first hand exposure to how this arbitrary tribunal operates internally, it's very valuable to have this insight that you cannot acquire really in any other way. So I'm very fortunate to say that I had the experience of looking at arbitrary proceedings from all three perspectives and it gives you a more complete picture of what arbitration is. It certainly looks very different from each perspective, and it's not just what it looks like from the corner that you are currently sitting at. And Marlena, in your experience, what skills should young lawyers develop if they want to build a career in international arbitration? You did mention that having this work experience will give them a really interesting view. But I'm also wondering about, you know, the skills that can be developed maybe before having such experience or if there's only a certain amount of job openings for that specific positions. Like, if that's not possible, what are some of the skills, be it, you know, soft skills or technical skills that would really help a young lawyer trying to find their way into international arbitration? That's a very good question. I think the conversation about skills in our profession sometimes is very focused on technical legal ability. And in more recent times, of course also how you're handling programs like AI, how you're able to work with different programs that will help you in management of larger files, for example, document productions and the such. But I believe there is more to that and that is often a skill set that you can develop beyond actually working in the field. Only one point that came to my mind is really focusing and laying a good foundation on learning how to think. And that sounds simple, but it's really not. Because the ability to analyze a problem, problem to its core and to question your owners assumptions and your own reasoning carefully and come to a decision under pressure. A lot of pressure being it because of the nature of the dispute or because a certain time sensitivity becomes very valuable. And if anything, it becomes more relevant in an age where I can produce convincing output very quickly. Because if you cannot critically evaluate this output yourself and becomes very difficult to stay in control of your own work. Another skill that I find very important is strategic thinking. So learning how to prioritize certain decisions, certain tasks. A lot of being a lawyer comes down to project management. So being organized, staying on top of your file of sometimes many files simultaneously, that sometimes also requires you to make decisions with incomplete information because more often than not, you don't have a full mapped out case in front of you. And beyond that, I'd like to point to interpersonal skills. So empathy, the ability to truly listen, to truly understand, the ability to collaborate effectively and also to build genuine relationships. It's not a secret that that in particular arbitration is a field that is highly relationship driven and it will remain essential and it will become even more so important to be able to build those connections. And I like to believe that this is a skill that cannot be outsourced so quickly. At 2:00 AM. I love that. No, I really appreciate it. And it's interesting to hear perspectives on the ice on AI should from different parts of the world because I believe that in North America overall, we have this idea that that Europe has a much more careful approach to data privacy and to all of that. So it's interesting to see how adoption has been taking a stage in different parts of the world. And I appreciate you, you're mentioning AI in this very substantial way. So I'm curious to know a little bit as well. When you think about, you know, the trajectory that you've done, I think I mentioned to you that most of the audience of the podcast today are young lawyers or early career professionals looking into all the different possibilities and what can you do with a law degree. And I wanted to ask you, you know, looking ahead, what do you see or, or how do you see international arbitration evolving in this next decade and not what opportunities might this create for the next generation of lawyers? I think it will be a very interesting next decade ahead and I probably have no idea what it's actually going to look like in 10 years and maybe we talk in 10 years. And I'd be shocked what happened. I think 1 immediate force that you already mentioned and that we talked about now is of course technology. AI is already changing very much the way that we handle document heavy cases, how we conduct legal research, how we manage logistics of cases, in particular in complex multi jurisdictional proceedings. It becomes more and more easy to also gain information about different legal systems. Whereas before you might have been maybe inclined to ask a colleague abroad to get at least a basic understanding of what is going on, now the hurdles are are much lower I would say. And this process I believe will only accelerate. But my honest view is that the lawyers who will thrive in this environment will be the ones who use the tools available intelligently, and those who will double down on exactly the interpersonal skills that we talked about, empathy, communication, strategic judgment, and genuine relationship building. Those things cannot be automated, and their relative value, I believe, will only increase as everything else will become more efficient. And the second major shift I believe is diversification of the field in itself. So that means geography. Geography, really culturally, in terms of the subject matter, I believe you're yourself a very good example of how you can shape the trajectory of your career beyond one jurisdiction yourself. And this is also something that we see in arbitration a lot, in arbitrary institutions that are growing in parts of the world where the tradition is still very new, their new voices that are entering the conversation. And this is changing the system in and of itself. And I believe the opportunities here are for lawyers who combine sharp legal thinking, interpersonal skills, and also curiosity for the field. These opportunities are great and the combination is something that makes international arbitration really unique and brings a lot of people together. Amazing, I appreciate you sharing those. I think that's a very optimistic view to the future and that's the one that I subscribed to. I prefer I definitely prefer that that look. It's funny in in a few episodes ago, actually, I interviewed someone who was mentioning a US model where most of the partners would not have an associate or just one associate share to to many partners thinking that with AI now young associates can get that execution done much quicker. But I really, I really like what you said, you know, the idea of being our school being open and also really even this idea that you can qualify in multiple jurisdictions and, and understand different aspects of, of something that makes it a very exciting future to look forward to. So I'm excited for this next decade and maybe we'll come back again in 10 years and do a new podcast, you know, saying what we thought it was going to happen, what actually happened. But I really do appreciate you taking the time to be in the podcast today. And I appreciate you all tuning in and listening. Of course, thank you so much for your time. It was a very interesting conversation indeed.