Arbitration Acumen - Inside VIAC: Niamh Leinwather on International Arbitration, the VIACan Ambassador Network and Deepfake Evidence [Podcast]

In this episode of Arbitration Acumen, J.P. Duffy speaks with Niamh Leinwather, secretary general of the Vienna International Arbitral Centre (VIAC) , an international arbitration institution based in Vienna, Austria. Niamh walks through VIAC’s 2025 caseload data, the VIACan ambassador network’s expansion across Central and Eastern Europe, VIAC’s 2021 rules for smaller investor-state disputes, the transparency-versus-confidentiality debate over publishing arbitral awards, and a new think-tank protocol for spotting deepfakes in arbitration evidence. VIAC’s 2025 docket totaled 69 cases, roughly 81 percent of them international, extending a trend that has held even as domestic arbitration slowly grows. The VIACan ambassador program, launched in February 2023, has grown into a network of 54 ambassadors across 39 countries. Niamh also touches on VIAC’s plans to expand into India and China. VIAC’s 2021 investment arbitration rules were designed to give small and medium-sized investors an affordable, efficient path for resolving lower-value investor-state disputes. Niamh also discusses how VIAC balances growing calls for transparency with parties’ expectations of confidentiality when publishing anonymized awards and extracts, and previews a new protocol from VIAC’s legal tech think tank to help arbitrators and counsel identify deepfakes and tampered digital evidence.