One of my clients recently had a case which I am explaining below and if you are stuck in such similar situation, here is what to do.
Note: Due to attorney-client privilege, I cannot disclose complete case details or identify the actual parties involved. However, I am sharing the essential facts and legal approach so that if you find yourself in a similar situation, you can understand the available solutions and legal remedies.
TL;DR: ICC arbitration in India is ordinary counsel work, and you do not need a foreign-qualified lawyer to run it. What decides your options is the seat of the arbitration, not the name of the institution. If the seat is outside India, an Indian High Court can still grant you interim protection under Section 9 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, because of a proviso inserted in 2015.
He emailed on a Sunday. Nikhil Deshpande runs an engineering components business out of Pune, and for close to a year he had been arguing with an overseas buyer over a consignment of machined parts that the buyer rejected on the strength of a quality report he did not accept. Early in March 2025 he began looking for counsel.
The contract ran to forty pages and buried its arbitration clause somewhere in the middle. It named the ICC Rules, seated the arbitration in
It named the ICC Rules, seated the arbitration outside India, and left the governing law to somebody else's statute book. He had signed it the way most people sign a purchase contract — quickly, at the end, because the delivery schedule is the part that matters when you are running a shop floor. Forty pages is a great deal of paper to spend on payment terms.
The first question he asked was not about the rejected consignment. It was whether he needed to hire a lawyer in the seat country before he could do anything at all. Someone had told him that ICC meant foreign counsel, foreign fees and a foreign bill of costs before the file even opened.
What I have is his account of the rejection, his reading of the quality report, and the contract as he sent it. Not the buyer's version of any of it