Obtaining Emergency or Interim Relief in Arbitration: A Practical Guide

Document type: Guide Practice area: Arbitration — International Arbitration Jurisdiction: United States Last reviewed: 5 September 2026

The first hour

An urgent matter arrives with incomplete information and a deadline. Six questions, answered fast, determine everything that follows.

1. What is the deadline? The date on which the irreversible thing happens — completion of a sale, effective date of a termination, a payment under a guarantee, a product launch, a filing. Everything is scheduled backwards from it.

2. What relief would actually prevent it? Stated as an operative order, in one sentence. If it cannot be stated in one sentence, the thinking is not finished.

3. Who must be bound? Only the counterparty, or also a bank, a registry, a purchaser, a third party in possession? An emergency arbitrator can bind only parties to the arbitration agreement. If a non-party must be bound, a court is required.

4. What does the clause say? Institution, rules, seat, whether emergency provisions apply or have been opted out, and whether court relief is expressly reserved.

5. When did the client know? Delay is the most common reason emergency applications fail, and the answer determines how the application must be framed.

6. What evidence exists now? Not what could be assembled in three weeks. What is in the file today.

Write the answers down. They are the application's skeleton.

Step one: decide whether to apply at all

Not every crisis warrants an emergency application.

Apply when: the harm is genuinely irreversible; the relief would prevent it; the standard can be met on evidence available now; and the cost is proportionate to the exposure.

Do not apply when: the harm is financial and the counterparty is solvent; the evidence is not ready; the relief sought is really the merits; or the client's own delay has undermined the urgency.

Two costs that are underweighted:

The record. An emergency decision recording that the case appeared weak or that the applicant delayed will be read by the tribunal deciding the merits. That is durable.

Disclosure. An emergency application shows the theory, the evidence, and the urgency months early, and gives the respondent time to prepare.

Consider the standstill letter instead. A letter identifying the conduct, asserting the breach, demanding a standstill, and stating that an emergency application will follow resolves a large share of would-be emergencies. It costs a day, it creates a record of promptness that answers the delay argument later, and it puts the respondent on notice that it proceeds at risk. Where it fails, the application is stronger for having been preceded by it.

Step two: choose the forum, or both

The emergency arbitrator can: bind the parties to the arbitration agreement; grant relief confidentially; and apply commercial judgment to a commercial contract.

The emergency arbitrator cannot: bind non-parties; act ex parte; or enforce coercively.

A court can: bind third parties; act without notice where notice would defeat the purpose; grant territorially specific relief such as attachment or freezing of an account; and enforce by contempt.

A court may be reluctant to: grant relief where the arbitral emergency mechanism was available and unused, unless the clause expressly reserves court relief.

Running both is right when each does something the other cannot — typically where the counterparty must be bound and a third party must also be reached. Running both is wrong when it is the same application twice.

If running both:

State in each application why that forum is needed for that relief.
Disclose each to the other. Both will find out.
Keep the factual assertions identical.
If the arbitrator refuses relief on the merits, do not ask a court for the same relief on the same facts.

Step three: build the evidence of urgency

This is where applications are won and lost, and it is documentary.

The chronology exhibit. A dated table: what the client learned, when, from what document, and what it did. If the client acted promptly, the table proves it. If it did not, you need to know before the respondent tells the arbitrator.

The deadline. Documented — the termination notice, the completion timetable, the launch announcement, the guarantee's expiry.

Why the tribunal cannot be constituted in time. State it explicitly with the institution's own timeline: appointment periods, conflicts checks, likely challenges. Do not assume the arbitrator will supply this.

Where there has been delay, address it head-on. Explain what the client was doing — negotiating, investigating, seeking assurances. An acknowledged and explained delay is far less damaging than one raised first by the respondent.

Step four: build the evidence of irreparable harm

Assertion fails; evidence works. What actually persuades:

Customer and counterparty contracts showing that relationships will move and not return.
Evidence of competitor activity — approaches to the client's customers, recruitment of its staff.
Financial analysis showing dependence on the relationship at issue, prepared by someone credible.
Evidence of the respondent's financial position where the concern is enforceability of a future award.
Evidence of dissipation — transfers, restructurings, changes in corporate structure, movement of assets.
The nature of the information where confidentiality is at issue: what it is, why it matters, what disclosure would destroy.
Evidence that the harm is not calculable, explained by reference to why a damages assessment would be speculative.

What does not work: "the applicant will suffer serious and irreparable harm" without more; projections with no basis; and characterizing plainly financial loss as reputational.

Step five: draft the operative order

Draft the order you want the arbitrator to make, in language that could be lifted into the decision. Under time pressure, a good draft is frequently adopted.

Requirements:

Operative and specific. "The Respondent shall not, directly or indirectly, sell, transfer, encumber, or otherwise dispose of the assets identified in Schedule A" — not "shall preserve the status quo."
Bounded in time. Until the tribunal is constituted and determines otherwise.
Capable of compliance. An order the respondent cannot perform will not be made.
Including a reporting obligation where useful: confirm compliance within five days, and notify before any step within the restrained category.
Including the security you propose, so the arbitrator does not have to invent it.
With a fallback. Offer a narrower alternative form. Arbitrators frequently grant something less than the primary relief, and a party that has drafted the lesser version controls what that is.

Step six: propose security

Interim relief is commonly conditioned on the applicant securing the respondent against loss if the relief turns out to have been wrongly granted.

Anticipate it. Quantify the respondent's realistic exposure. Propose a form — a bank guarantee, a payment into escrow, a parent undertaking — and a mechanism for release.

Why proposing it helps. It signals confidence, it removes an argument, and it prevents the arbitrator imposing a condition the client cannot meet, which would make the relief worthless.

Where the client cannot provide security, say so early and explain why the relief should nonetheless be granted — usually because the respondent's exposure is minimal or because the harm from refusal is disproportionate.

Step seven: file and run the process

The application identifies the parties, the arbitration agreement, the relief sought, the reasons, and why it cannot await the tribunal. File the request for arbitration at the same time or within the period the rules allow.

Request an immediate holding direction. Several institutions permit the emergency arbitrator to direct the parties to preserve the position pending the decision. Ask for it in the application. Applicants forget, and the two weeks it covers are frequently the two weeks that matter.

Keep the submissions short. Fifteen to thirty pages, with the key documents exhibited. Two hundred pages signals a misunderstanding of the exercise.

Witness statements short and directed at urgency and harm, not at the merits.

The hearing is conversational, one to three hours, usually by video. The arbitrator will have read everything. Prepare a one-page summary of the relief sought in operative terms, and be ready to answer why the tribunal cannot deal with it.

Step eight: defending an application

The respondent has days, and the defences that work are mostly not about the merits.

Attack urgency first, with a chronology exhibit showing the applicant's knowledge and inaction. Documentary, and effective.

Attack irreparability. Is the harm calculable? Is the respondent solvent? A short statement of financial position answers a great deal.

Attack scope. Even where some relief is warranted, the request is usually broader than necessary. Propose the narrower version you can live with. This is the most productive move available.

Ask for security, quantified, in a proposed form.

Preserve jurisdiction expressly, but do not stake the response on a jurisdictional argument that cannot be resolved in days.

Do not over-argue the merits. A full merits defence tells the arbitrator the case is complicated, which favours preserving the status quo.

And comply if you lose. Non-compliance becomes a credibility problem for the life of the case.

Step nine: enforcement

Compliance is usually voluntary, because the losing party must face the tribunal that will decide the merits.

Where it is not:

Ask for the award form rather than an order, where the rules permit, and ask the arbitrator to state that the decision finally determines the application for interim relief.
Seek confirmation in a court with jurisdiction over the respondent. US courts have confirmed emergency awards, generally on the reasoning that an interim award finally disposing of a discrete issue is confirmable.
Report non-compliance to the tribunal as soon as it is constituted, and seek relief: confirmation of the emergency decision, an order in the tribunal's own name, adverse inferences, and costs.
Consider a court application for parallel relief, framed as necessary because the arbitral order has not been complied with.

And record everything. Non-compliance is evidence, and the record made contemporaneously is what the tribunal will act on.

Step ten: after the tribunal is constituted

The emergency decision is provisional. The tribunal may confirm, modify, terminate, or annul it, and it will do so on a fuller record.

For the successful applicant: apply promptly to have the relief confirmed in the tribunal's own name, in award form, with findings sufficient to support enforcement. Do not assume the emergency decision continues indefinitely.

For the unsuccessful respondent: the first substantive application to the tribunal is the opportunity to revisit the relief with proper evidence. Relief granted on days of material is frequently modified once the picture is complete.

For the unsuccessful applicant: the same. A refusal on a thin record is not a merits determination, and a renewed application supported by documents and witness evidence is a different proposition.

Either way, address the emergency decision expressly in the first submissions rather than leaving the tribunal to work out what remains in force.

Step eleven: fix the clause

Every emergency application reveals what the clause should have said. For the next agreement:

An express court-relief reservation, before and after constitution, stating that such an application is not incompatible with the arbitration agreement.
A deliberate decision on emergency provisions — in or out, recorded, not inherited from an old model clause.
An enforceability provision: the parties agree an emergency decision is binding, will comply, agree it may be enforced as an award, and waive any objection based on lack of finality.
A seat whose courts will act, quickly, in aid of arbitration.
Expedited constitution where speed matters — a sole arbitrator, shortened appointment periods, or institutional appointment on a fixed timetable.
A notice or standstill obligation before termination or before a call on a guarantee, which converts a foreseeable emergency into a manageable dispute.

Worked example one: the guarantee call

Ana-Lucía Restrepo receives a call on a Thursday. Her client, a contractor, has been notified that the employer will call a $28 million on-demand performance guarantee the following Tuesday. The contract's disputes clause provides for institutional arbitration seated in London, with emergency provisions.

The first hour.

Deadline: Tuesday. Four working days. Relief: an order restraining the employer from calling the guarantee pending the tribunal's determination of whether the alleged default occurred. Who must be bound: the employer, and — critically — the issuing bank, which is not a party to the arbitration agreement. Clause: emergency provisions apply; court relief expressly reserved. Knowledge: the client received the default notice eleven days ago and has been responding to it. Evidence: the notice, the client's response, progress records, and the independent engineer's certificates.

The forum analysis. An emergency arbitrator can restrain the employer from calling. It cannot restrain the bank from paying. Under an on-demand instrument the bank pays against a conforming demand regardless of the underlying dispute, so relief against the employer must arrive before the demand is made.

What Ana-Lucía does. She files the emergency application Thursday evening and requests an immediate holding direction. The institution appoints Friday. The emergency arbitrator directs, on Friday afternoon, that the employer take no step to call the guarantee before the decision — which is the order that actually saves the client, five days before any reasoned decision.

She also prepares, but does not file, a court application against the bank, on the basis that fraud in the demand would be required to restrain a bank — a high threshold she does not meet on these facts. Recognizing that, she does not file it. Filing a hopeless application to a court would have cost credibility she needs elsewhere.

The hearing is on the following Wednesday. The emergency arbitrator orders the employer not to call the guarantee for sixty days or until the tribunal determines otherwise, conditioned on the contractor providing a $2 million counter-security and continuing to perform.

Why it worked: the holding direction, requested on day one; the eleven-day delay explained by the client's engagement with the default process; and documentary evidence — the engineer's certificates — that made the prima facie case concrete.

Worked example two: the departing team

Bertrand Okonjo's client, a specialist consultancy, discovers that four senior consultants have resigned simultaneously to join a competitor, and that they downloaded a substantial volume of client files in the preceding fortnight. The employment agreements contain arbitration clauses; the competitor is not a party to any of them.

The forum split, again.

Against the four individuals: emergency arbitration is available, but there are four separate arbitration agreements. Consolidation of four emergency applications is awkward and the rules do not obviously provide for it.

Against the competitor: only a court.

What Bertrand does. He applies to court for an order against all five — the four individuals and the competitor — relying on the express reservation in the employment agreements. The individuals argue that the claim against them must go to arbitration.

The court's approach is the standard one: it grants interim relief preserving the position, including an order to preserve and deliver up the downloaded material and to refrain from using it, and directs that the merits proceed in the appropriate forum. The relief against the individuals is expressly in aid of the arbitrations Bertrand's client then commences.

The evidence that mattered: forensic logs showing the downloads, their timing, and their volume; the specific client files involved; and the covenants in the employment agreements. Not assertions about the value of the relationships.

What Bertrand does next. He commences four arbitrations and, at the first procedural conference in each, asks the tribunals to confirm the court's preservation order in their own terms so that it survives the court application's expiry.

The lesson. Where the necessary defendants span parties and non-parties, court relief in aid of arbitration is usually the answer — and the express reservation in the clause is what makes it available without a fight about waiver.

Worked example three: the defensive win

Kirsten Amundsen defends an emergency application seeking to restrain her client from completing an acquisition, brought by a party claiming a right of first refusal under a shareholders' agreement.

Her response, in four days.

Chronology. The applicant was notified of the proposed transaction seven weeks earlier, in a letter that expressly invited it to exercise the right of first refusal within thirty days. It did not respond. It applied four days before completion. Kirsten's chronology exhibit is one page and it is the strongest thing in the file.

Irreparability. The applicant's claimed harm is the loss of the opportunity to acquire shares. If it succeeds on the merits, damages are calculable by reference to the price and the value — an ordinary valuation exercise.

Balance of harm. Her client has committed to a purchase price, incurred financing costs, and has obligations to the seller. Delay would cost it a quantified $4.1 million in break costs and financing.

Scope. Even if the applicant were right, the appropriate relief would be preservation of the shares pending determination — not restraint of the whole transaction. Kirsten drafts that narrower order herself and offers it.

Security. If any relief is granted, the applicant should secure her client's costs of delay.

The outcome. The application is refused, principally on urgency and balance of harm. The emergency arbitrator notes the applicant's seven-week silence.

What made the difference was the chronology and the offered alternative. Kirsten did not argue the merits of the right of first refusal at all — a question that could not be decided in four days and that would have made the case look complicated enough to warrant preservation.

Running the team under time pressure

An emergency application is a four-day project with a fixed deadline, and it fails on organization more often than on law.

Assign roles on hour one:

Lead. Owns the strategy, the forum decision, and the operative relief. Does not draft.
Drafter. Writes the application. One person, not three.
Evidence owner. Assembles the chronology, the exhibits, and the witness statements. This is the critical role and it should go to whoever knows the file best.
Client contact. A single named person at the client who can obtain documents and decisions immediately, including out of hours.
Institutional liaison. Files, tracks, and manages the fee payment — which can hold up an appointment if nobody attends to it.
Local counsel, if a parallel court application is possible, engaged on hour one rather than day three.

The evidence problem. In an emergency the documents are wherever they are. Have the client search email, not just document management systems. Accept imperfect exhibits — a screenshot with a timestamp is better than nothing, and an incomplete exhibit disclosed as incomplete is far better than one that appears complete and is not.

Witness statements should be short, factual, and signed. A statement from someone with direct knowledge of two facts beats a statement from a senior executive with knowledge of none.

The chronology is drafted first, before the submissions, because it determines whether the application is viable.

Decide the fallback early. What is the narrower relief the client would accept? Draft it. Do not leave it to be improvised at the hearing.

And set a stop point. If the evidence of urgency or irreparable harm is not there by a stated hour, the application does not go. That decision is easier to make in advance than at midnight on day three.

Cross-border enforcement of interim relief

Where the parties and assets span jurisdictions, the practical question is not what the arbitrator orders but what happens in the place where the assets are.

The pattern that works: obtain the arbitral order against the party, then use it as the foundation for local applications where enforcement is needed. A local court asked to assist an arbitration is generally more receptive when presented with a reasoned arbitral decision than with a bare application.

What varies by jurisdiction:

Whether the local court will grant relief in aid of a foreign-seated arbitration. Some will; some will not; some will only where local assets are involved.
Whether an interim award is enforceable there, or only a final one.
Whether the local court will treat an emergency arbitrator's decision as an award at all.
Timing. Some courts act in days; others in months, which defeats the purpose.
Whether ex parte relief is available.

Practical steps:

Map the jurisdictions early — where the assets are, where the counterparty operates, where enforcement will eventually be sought.
Engage local counsel in the key jurisdictions on day one, with a specific question: can you get relief here, how fast, and what do you need from us.
Ask the arbitrator for findings that support local enforcement — a reasoned decision, findings on jurisdiction, and where possible the award form.
Do not over-file. Applications in five jurisdictions, three of which fail, produce a record of failed applications that the counterparty will use.

When there is no emergency arbitrator and no time

Occasionally the clause predates the emergency provisions, or the parties opted out, and the tribunal cannot be constituted in time.

The options, in order:

Court relief in aid of arbitration, relying on the express reservation if there is one and on the general principle if there is not. The authorities support this: a court may grant relief pending arbitration where the traditional standards are met, and doing so preserves rather than undermines the arbitration.
Expedited constitution. Most institutions will move quickly if asked and if the reason is explained. A sole arbitrator appointed in a week, by agreement, is sometimes achievable and is better than an emergency arbitrator whose decision the tribunal will revisit anyway.
An agreed standstill. Counterparties agree more often than expected when the alternative is an application both will pay for. A short standstill agreement — no disposal, no termination, no call, for thirty days, without prejudice — costs an afternoon.
Agreement to appoint an emergency arbitrator ad hoc, notwithstanding the opt-out. The parties can agree to anything, and a respondent confident of its position may prefer a fast neutral decision to a court application in the applicant's chosen forum.

What not to do: proceed as though nothing can be done. The absence of an emergency mechanism is a reason to move to a court, not a reason to accept the harm.

Costs and who pays

The direct costs of an emergency application: the institutional application fee, the emergency arbitrator's fee, and counsel's time compressed into a few days — which is expensive per hour because everything is urgent and nothing can be delegated to a normal timetable. For a substantial matter, budget accordingly and tell the client on day one.

Allocation. The emergency arbitrator usually reserves costs to the tribunal, which decides them with the merits. Occasionally an emergency arbitrator awards costs immediately where an application was plainly unmeritorious or where the respondent's conduct made it necessary.

The strategic point. An application that succeeds is usually recovered eventually; one that fails is not, and it also damages the position on the merits. That asymmetry is another argument against marginal applications.

Security's cost. Where relief is conditioned on a bank guarantee or an escrow payment, the cost of providing it — fees, tied-up cash, balance sheet effect — is real and should be modelled before the application, not discovered after the order.

Telling the client. Three numbers on day one: the cost of the application; the cost of the security likely to be required; and the exposure if the application is not made. The third is usually an order of magnitude larger, which makes the decision straightforward — but the client should make it with the numbers in front of them.

A short list of errors

Not asking for a holding direction. The single most valuable thing available in the first forty-eight hours, and it is routinely omitted from applications.

Applying against the wrong party. An emergency arbitrator cannot bind the bank, the purchaser, or the registry.

Asserting irreparable harm without evidence. The most common substantive failure.

Delay, unexplained. The most common procedural failure.

Seeking the merits. Relief that finally determines the claim will not be granted on a two-day record.

Filing two hundred pages. It signals that the applicant does not understand the exercise, and nobody will read it in the time available.

No draft order. The arbitrator drafts something narrower and vaguer than the applicant wanted, because the applicant did not supply the words.

No fallback. The primary relief is refused and there is nothing to grant instead.

Ignoring an adverse decision. Non-compliance converts a procedural loss into a credibility problem that lasts for the whole case.

Forgetting to confirm the relief with the tribunal. The emergency decision does not run forever, and a party that assumes it does can find the protection has lapsed.

Preparing before the emergency

The best emergency work is done months earlier, by clients who have thought about what could go wrong.

For any relationship where urgent relief is foreseeable — a distribution network, a joint venture with a partner in a difficult jurisdiction, a project with a large performance guarantee, a business built on confidential information — do the following at the outset:

Know the clause. Institution, seat, whether emergency provisions apply, whether court relief is reserved. Record it on one line in the contract summary.

Identify the foreseeable emergency. Termination? A guarantee call? Departure of a team? Asset transfer? Name it.

Identify the forum for it. Which relief would be needed, against whom, and can an emergency arbitrator provide it or is a court required.

Pre-engage local counsel in the jurisdictions where relief would be needed. A five-minute conversation now, and a name in the file, saves a day in the emergency.

Set up the evidence. If the foreseeable emergency is misuse of confidential information, is there logging? If it is asset transfer, is there visibility of the counterparty's structure? The evidence that wins an emergency application is generated before the emergency, or not at all.

Diary the trigger points. Guarantee expiry dates, notice periods, renewal dates, the dates on which a counterparty could act.

And build the standstill letter template for the two or three foreseeable scenarios, so that the first response can go out within hours rather than days.

None of this is expensive. It is the difference between an application prepared in four days from a standing start and one prepared in four days by a team that knew what it was going to do.

A closing thought

Urgent relief in arbitration is one of the few areas where the procedural machinery has genuinely improved in a generation. Twenty-five years ago, a party facing an imminent irreversible act between the dispute and the tribunal had one option and it was a court, in a jurisdiction that might or might not help. Now there is a mechanism that appoints a decision-maker in two days and produces a reasoned decision in two weeks, and it works.

But it works within limits that are structural and will not change. An emergency arbitrator's authority comes from the parties' agreement, so it reaches only the parties. It cannot act ex parte, because it must give both sides a hearing. It cannot enforce, because it has no coercive power. And its decision is provisional, because a tribunal that has not been constituted cannot be bound by it.

Those limits are not defects; they are what makes the mechanism legitimate. The practical consequence is that a lawyer facing an emergency has to think about which instrument does which job — the arbitrator for the counterparty, the court for the third party and for coercion, the standstill letter for the case that does not need either — and to think about it in the first hour, before the deadline that determines everything has moved another day closer.

The categories of relief, and how to frame each

A practical note on framing, because the same facts support different requests and some are far more likely to succeed.

Preserving a contract. Ask for an order restraining termination and requiring continued performance on existing terms for a defined period. Offer to pay in advance, or on shortened terms, to reduce the respondent's exposure. Frame it as preserving the status quo, not as specific performance.

Preserving assets. Identify the assets specifically, in a schedule. A general asset-freezing request against a commercial counterparty is usually too broad; an order restraining disposal of five named items is grantable. Add a reporting obligation and a carve-out for ordinary-course dealings, which removes the respondent's strongest objection.

Preserving evidence. The easiest relief to obtain. Ask for preservation, suspension of deletion policies, and a certificate of compliance. Do not overreach into inspection unless it is genuinely necessary now.

Protecting confidential information. Identify the information with particularity — categories, documents, systems. Ask for restraint of use and disclosure, delivery up or sequestration, and a certificate. Generic assertions about "confidential information" fail.

Restraining parallel proceedings. Frame it as an order that the party discontinue or refrain, not as a direction to the foreign court. Acknowledge the comity issue expressly; arbitrators are more comfortable granting relief when the applicant has recognized the sensitivity.

Security for a claim. Requires evidence that an award would be unenforceable — asset movement, structural changes, a shell counterparty. Absent that, it fails, and it is the request most often made without the necessary foundation.

Interim payment. Only where the entitlement is clear and undisputed as to part. Frame it narrowly around the undisputed portion.

In every case, the framing question is the same: does this preserve the position, or does it give the applicant what it is claiming? Relief in the first category is grantable on a thin record. Relief in the second is not.

Choosing the emergency arbitrator's profile

The parties do not select the emergency arbitrator — the institution appoints — but they can influence the appointment, and few applicants try.

What to communicate to the institution, briefly, in the application:

The subject matter and the expertise it calls for: construction, energy, financial products, technology, life sciences.
The languages in which the key documents are written.
The availability required — an emergency arbitrator must be free to work on this immediately, and the institution needs to know the deadline.
Any obvious conflicts to avoid, with the full list of parties, affiliates, counsel, and funders.

What the institution is looking for: someone available immediately, with no conflicts, experienced in urgent applications, and comfortable making a decision on incomplete material. That last quality matters more than eminence — an emergency arbitrator who wants more evidence before deciding is of no use to anybody.

Challenges. A party may challenge an emergency arbitrator on the ordinary grounds, and institutions decide such challenges quickly. A challenge made to delay is transparent and is usually dismissed within days, but it can cost the applicant the time it does not have — which is a reason for the applicant to raise conflicts proactively rather than discover them mid-process.

One practical point. Provide the full party list — including affiliates, guarantors, funders, and expert witnesses if known — with the application. An appointment unwound by a late-discovered conflict is the worst possible outcome in a matter measured in days.

The one-page brief for the client

Before filing, send this. It takes fifteen minutes and it prevents every misunderstanding that follows.

EMERGENCY APPLICATION — WHAT TO EXPECT

What we are asking for: [the relief, in one sentence]. Against whom: [party]. Note: the emergency arbitrator cannot bind [the bank / the purchaser / any third party]; if that becomes necessary we will need a court. Deadline we are working to: [date]. Timetable: appointment within [1–2] days · your response window [2–5] days · hearing around day [8–10] · decision by day [14–15]. What it costs: application fee $[] · arbitrator's fee approximately $[] · our fees, compressed, estimated $[]. If we win: the order binds until the tribunal is constituted, which is [2–4] months away. The tribunal can then confirm, change, or set it aside on fuller evidence. We will apply to have it confirmed. Likely condition: we will probably be required to provide security of around $[] against the risk that the relief was wrongly granted. Please confirm this is available. If we lose: the tribunal will read the decision. We can renew the application to the tribunal with better evidence, and losing now is not a decision on the merits — but it is not costless. What we need from you today: [documents], [a witness who can speak to ___], [confirmation on security], and one named person available at any hour until [date].

The last line is the one that matters. Emergency applications fail because a document could not be found on a Saturday, and a single empowered client contact solves it.