aspects of the company's operations and, in some cases, it even involves the disclosure of certain business secrets or company processes, whose knowledge by the market could easily weaken the company. In the chapter on disadvantages, the frst to be mentioned is the cost of the arbitration process. As an example, in a dispute submitted to the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce and where the sum of €500,000.00 is discussed with the intervention of three arbitrators, the total costs of the proceedings may range from a minimum of €33,157.00 to a maximum of €112,717.00, with the average being €72,937.00. If the same dispute is submitted, for example, to a Portuguese court, the amount to be spent on legal fees will be €4080. To these amounts, in both cases, one must add the fees of the lawyers responsible for the case, which also tend to be higher in arbitration proceedings than in state proceedings. The cost diferences between the two dispute resolution procedures are overwhelming. The choice for arbitration, given the high cost, should therefore bring some beneft to the organisations resorting to arbitration that not only cancels out this cost diference, but supplants it. The International Chamber of Commerce, for example, seeks to justify the advantage of resorting to international arbitration with the fact that lawyers' fees are much lower, since the proceedings are resolved in much less time. We do not agree with this justifcation. In fact, lawyers' fees are mostly fxed taking into account the complexity of the issue and the amounts involved in the dispute, not the time it takes for the proceedings to be concluded. Still on the disadvantages, we should mention the greater difculty for the less well represented party (usually the economically weaker one) in choosing a trustworthy and competent arbitrator, the difculty for lawyers to justify to their clients the loss of the case in the arbitral tribunal, considering the added cost it represented, or, still, when the matter to be decided implies the carrying out of many and complex acts of proof, as in these cases the arbitrators may come up against strong state limitations on the obtaining of that proof, which do not exist in courts of law. 3. ARBITRATION AS A COMPETITIVENESS FACTOR Arbitration, beyond the legal aspects of its context, is also, and above all, a socio-economic phenomenon. Sociological, because society demands more and better dispute resolution processes, to which legislators, everywhere, are sensitive; economic, because the feld of development of arbitration cannot but be the economy and, within this, national and international trade. Regarding the enormous infuence of arbitration in international trade, Menezes Cordeiro even states that "Arbitration is a pioneer in globalisation" . Indeed, the 9 challenges posed by the economic globalisation movement at the end of the last century, whose efects have extended into the current one, demand a dispute resolution model that goes beyond national barriers and accepts a self-regulatory, highly specialised and, no less importantly, swift content. It is therefore understandable the "popularity" of international arbitration in international trade relations. Cordeiro, 2015, pag. 62. 9 9
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