An English novelist wrote 'The past is another country. They do things differently there.' We are here together in this fine city to celebrate the passage of 75 years, which should prompt us to look back to what has happened since 1923 in order to prepare ourselves for what may happen in the next decade.

The discussions which we have heard today have been so tightly packed and thought-provoking that it would be impossible to epitomize them fairly without trying the patience of this large gathering at the end of a long day. Instead, I will offer some general reflections on the future, echoing some of the observations made in the course of the conference, most recently and vigorously by Gerald Aksen, with every one of whose statements I whole heartedly agree.

I approach the future by way of that other country, the past, for two reasons. First because the past reminds us that arbitration does not exist in a vacuum. Arbitration presents a variety of conceptual problems of great subtlety and interest. This makes it very easy to believe that by taking arbitration as it exists today, by intensifying the analyses and adjusting the practicalities, we can bring it to a state of perfection in which change need take place only in the margins.

This is a profound mistake, for the landscape of economic history is littered with the tombs of obsolete skills. Take, for example, the fletchers, a word which has virtually disappeared from the English language; the fletchers made arrows. It took a lot of skills to make an arrow, which would fly fast and straight. They had those skills. Where are the fletchers now? Disappeared, because nobody wanted their skills.

Take the 'sabotiers'. To make a comfortable and wearable wooden clog needed skills. But not many people wear clogs and there aren't many people left who make them. The industry is gone.

Take the telegraph operators who transmitted and received Morse code with phenomenal speed. Where is the call for their services? Where are they now?

So also with the compositors and linotypists who printed our newspapers: very highly skilled people who became redundant in ten years under the impact of computer typesetting.

The list is endless, and it is a memento mori. Arbitration is not an art form whose existence justifies itself, though we sometimes discuss it as if it were. It is not a repository of a timeless truth, like the theory of numbers in mathematics.

It is a tool, whose existence is justified only so far as it serves the interests of commerce. The important people are not the arbitrators, the advocates, the professors, or the national judges, but the parties to the dispute. These people are rarely, if ever, seen at arbitration congresses, yet we are their servants. If we do not provide the work they need, they will dispense with our services. Arbitration and those who participate in it will become redundant. Not because our skills are deficient, or because we do not work hard, but because we failed to adapt our skills, or to adapt them fast enough to a world which is in a state of constant change. It is essential now to recognize this state of accelerating change.

One need not look back 75 years to see this acceleration. It is enough to take cross sections of 35 years, 20 years and 10 years even, to see how the face of commerce has become unrecognizable. The physical subject matter of commerce is different. The instruments of commerce are different. Bills of exchange have gone. Bills of lading are going. On the scene have arrived electronic transfer of title, instantaneous transfer of funds, electronic transfer of possession, electronic sales in the retail on the Internet, and so on. Even the substantive law is struggling to keep up.

Again, there has been, in the post-war years, a revolution in methods of transportation. There has been a revolution in modes of communication, a revolution in methods of administration. The up-to-date office of today feels nothing like the office of former years. Now, the mobile phone is used between people within an office, the laptop, the intranet within the office, the outworkers. This creates a psychological spirit within an office which bears no resemblance to what existed 75 years ago. Yesterday's computer seems ludicrous today. The humorous maxim 'If it works, it's out of date' conceals a truth of contemporary commerce. We live in a feverish world, which is constantly on the move, physically and psychologically, and it is a younger world. And we in the world, the little world, of arbitration must recognize this, like it or not, and be prepared to change as well.

The second use of looking back is that, if we plot a trajectory for the future, we can only do so by drawing a line from the past through the present into that future. You cannot know where to go without knowing where you've been. So, we need to know how arbitration has already reacted to changes in the world around it, so that we can see how it should react in the future.

Today's meeting vividly illustrates that arbitration has indeed been on the move. Would the subject matter and the tone of a similar meeting 25 years ago have been the same? Surely not. As to the subject matter, the great movement forward has been the recognition that effective management of disputes is an intricate part of managing a commercial operation as a whole. It is no good planning the distribution of risk within the operation, risk in the broader sense, expressing it accurately in a contract and then finding that when a dispute arises, the outcome falsifies what the parties had planned.

Effective dispute resolution, therefore, needs to be built into the individual contract. And since commercial life is infinitely various, it is no use presenting the parties with a single monolithic method called arbitration and leaving them to take it or leave it, because we must recognize that, to an increasing degree, they are now leaving it. We must offer a repertory of methods and make sure that commercial people know that they exist and help them-preferably when the transaction is planned, but if necessary, later-to choose the method best suited to the transaction and to the actual dispute or to the possible future dispute.

This leads to the second major change, the recognition that dispute resolution should be tailored to the nature of the dispute inevitably leads to the recognition that the commercial world needs a complete armoury of dispute resolution methods. Once there were just the courts and arbitration. And the courts were seen by many not to be performing usefully, so people went to arbitration. But there is a body of opinion today which believes that arbitration, even good arbitration, arbitration well conducted, is not necessarily the best way of deciding certain types of disputes and that other ways will have to be found.

This opinion of users has been slow to gain acceptance in some sections of the arbitration community. Fortunately, that is now changing, as we see from the presence of the words 'conciliation' and 'mediation' on our agenda, something which would, I think, have been almost impossible at a meeting like this 25 years ago.

But the user's demands have changed faster than we have changed. The user knows that even if litigation and arbitration are, for certain disputes, the best way forward, mediation or conciliation, call it what you like, may not itself always be the best alternative. Perhaps you need something different. Just as the strength of arbitration, or what ought to be its strength, is its adaptability, so with alternative dispute resolution.

It is not enough to say we only mediate if people want it and that is all they can have if they do not want arbitration. I say, in company I believe with Gerald, never mind what it is called. Never mind what rules you establish. Let's get a system that works. And it may be that, on the long and infinitely varying spectrum which has litigation at one end followed by arbitration, fairly close to that end, with mediation at the other extremity, you may find a method which lies between. Early neutral evaluation, a very powerful tool in some kinds of disputes. Or mini-trials. And I am troubled for the future, that if we institutionalize alternatives to arbitration with too many fixed categories and too many rules, we compromise the flexibility which enables us to offer the commercial world a practical tailor-made solution to its problems. Now, the emphasis laid on this fact during the morning session gave us much to reflect upon.

And just as we have come to recognize the essential importance of dispute resolution, so have the states, which see it as a piece of macroeconomics to set in place by legislation, the kind of arbitration act which is now a feature of many countries throughout the world. The legislation is there, not because the arbitrators and the professors find it useful, but because the state, and those who constitute the state, realize the importance of integrating dispute resolution into the world of commerce as a whole.

There have been tensions, as has been said, and this is indeed obvious, between arbitration and the national courts. The interface will never be free from uncertainty and sometimes dispute. But the wasteful heat has gone out of that particular dispute. It is now recognized, in a way that was not the case in the past, that the courts have something to offer arbitration if they realize what arbitration is about, and if they honour the principles on which the parties contracted to arbitrate. And there is, by osmosis, not by diktat, or by grand theory, a joining together of the great instruments of dispute resolution, the courts and the other methods. And there is also, by osmosis, and not by diktat, a most creditable and heart-warming joining together of ideals. No longer do we have the kind of forensic xenophobia which disfigured the dispute resolution scene sometime ago. We do not find that now. We find people from tradition A prepared to listen carefully to what is said by people from tradition B and think, 'That's pretty good. I like that. Why don't we do it that way?' And vice versa.

And there are other welcome changes for the good in recent arbitration history, which we must try to project forward. We cannot overlook that there has been retrograde motion. The colonization of arbitration, not just by lawyers, because lawyers are not all that bad, but by legalistic methods, legalistic attitudes and legalistic manners, which are out of place in our dispute resolution world. And these are not what the client wants. We must fight against them by devising methods better suited to the clients' commercial needs.

So much for the past and present. What about the future? I had ordered from Lalique a crystal ball, but because of fog at the airport, it has been delayed en route. How can we peer through the fog and see what awaits us? The future, like the past, is another country. What will its geography be? Only one thing can be asserted with conviction: if arbitration is just the same ten years from now as it is today, it will have failed, because it is certain that the commercial world which arbitration exists to serve will have changed and changed rapidly.

Arbitration is under threat in 1998, not from outside, not from other dispute resolution methods. ADR is not an enemy of arbitration but a friend whom we should warmly embrace. The threat is from the inside. The risk is that arbitration will ossify, will congeal, will become or perhaps remain too introspective, so preoccupied with the enhancement of existing principles and techniques and analyses, that the energies and visions of those who take part are turned inward, rather than outward to the commercial world of which arbitration is an important but nevertheless quite a small part.

The first test of arbitration in the future may come very soon with the flood, the torrent of claims, which may well spring from the so-called Millennium Bug. How much thought is being given in our world about how to tackle this? Not much, so far as I can see. It will require imagination and vigour.

Now, I do not want to sound too apocalyptic at the end of a truly excellent day's work. Arbitration need not go the way of the clog makers. Arbitrators need not become redundant. But to avoid this, we must cultivate a new armoury of qualities. Let us keep experience, knowledge, intellectual skills, hard work and integrity; they are all vital. But let us add receptiveness. Receptiveness to the world which we serve, alertness to the lessons we can learn from others. Agility, speed of response to new demands. Boldness, willingness to experiment, to take risks. Versatility. Innovation. In short, imagination

And we also need a youthfulness, not just of age, though I believe that youthfulness of age is an essential ingredient in the world of arbitration in future, but a youthfulness of spirit. It will be a young and unfamiliar world, which at least some of us will face in the year 2010. It will create challenges for arbitration, greater than the challenges faced by arbitration in the whole of the past 75 years together. We must and can respond to these challenges. And what is needed is not only improvement of knowledge and technique, such as we have gained immeasurably during today's proceedings, but a new spirit. And that's what I believe we must work together for the future to foster.