Profile

Dr Herfried Wöss is partner of Wöss & Partners (Mexico City and Washington DC) and has extensive experience in international commercial and investment arbitration under the ICC, UNCITRAL, ICSID, NAFTA and various local arbitration rules both as arbitrator and party counsel. His arbitration experience spans from refinery-ships, thermo-electrical plants and substations, gas and oil pipelines, EPC turnkey projects, public-private partnerships, M&A, joint venture agreements, franchise agreements, international sales contracts, and the telecommunications, automotive and pharmaceutical industries. Several of his awards and publications have produced judicial precedents in favour of arbitration.

As part of his corporate practice, he has advised clients and financial institutions in international public tenders and contracts with state entities as regards infrastructure and construction projects, privately-financed infrastructure projects, hydro and thermoelectric power plants, transmission lines, wind and solar energy projects.

He is a member of the ICC Arbitration Commission, the international panel of the International Centre for Dispute Resolution (ICDR) of the American Arbitration Association (AAA), the executive board of the North American branch of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, the country representative of the Dispute Resolution Board Foundation and listed by many regional arbitration centres and institutions such as the Vienna International Arbitration Centre, the German Institution of Arbitration, the Swiss Arbitration Association, the Spanish Arbitration Club, and the Mexican Arbitration Center.

Dr Herfried Wöss is author of the book "Damages in International Arbitration under Complex Long-term Contracts" together with his partner Adriana San Román and two economists, Prof Pablo T Spiller and Santiago Dellepiane, published by Oxford University Press in spring 2014. He is the co-founder of the Investment Arbitration Forum and has co-edited and co-authored two books on investment arbitration, and has also written a large number of articles on a wide range of topics from arbitration to WTO law, including a manual on dispute resolution under the NAFTA parallel agreement on labour co-operation. He is also a special editor on Latin America and CETA for "Transnational Dispute Management".

Dr Wöss is also considered one of the leading international trade lawyers and has participated in cases before the European Court of Justice, the WTO, anti-dumping and countervailing duty investigations and other trade measures in different countries around the world, particularly in Latin America. He has participated in trade negotiations and advised governments and large corporations with respect to rules of origin, GATT, GATS, TRIPS, technical standards, labelling norms, subsidies and government procurement.

Dr Wöss has been visiting scholar for arbitration at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington DC from 2012-2013. He started his career with Prof Pieter Jan Kuijper at the Legal Service of the European Commission. He holds a Magister iuris and a Doctorate in International Economic Law (summa cum laude) from the Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, Austria, an LLM in International Business Legal Studies from the University of Exeter, UK, and is Licenciado en Derecho from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He works in German, English and Spanish and reads French.