John Burritt McArthur

Overview

John Burritt McArthur was first appointed as an arbitrator in 1994. A decade later in 2004, an affiliate of Pacific Gas and Electric Company appointed him as its neutral appointee in a billion-dollar dispute with two electricity power companies. One party settled, and the arbitration proceeded and ended in an award on the remaining half-billion dollar claim in 2007.

The PG&E arbitration persuaded McArthur that carefully managed arbitrations can provide a better process than court litigation. The next year, McArthur established a solo office in Berkeley, California, and began building his arbitration practice.

The American Arbitration Association added McArthur to its Large Complex Case, Commercial, Oil and Gas, and National Energy Panels a few months after he opened his solo office. McArthur has devoted the bulk of his time over the last 17 years to arbitration.

Other provider listings followed, as shown in About: Credentials below. His experience led to his admission to other major arbitral institutions -- institutions, including as a Distinguished Neutral for CPR, a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, a Fellow of the College of Commercial Arbitrations, and a Member of the National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals.

McArthur’s arbitrations frequently include complex technical issues, for instance the planning and infrastructure for distributing electricity from a generating plant to downstream buyers; the technology for producing oil and gas; the operation of national brokerages’ internal monitoring systems; and, as chair, supervision of prehearing information exchanges of electronic data files.

McArthur has extensive experience interpreting business records, supervising production of information to get parties in arbitration ready for hearing including disputes over electronic production, and interpreting technical information, including economic and financial data. See Arbitration Examples. For areas in which he has worked most extensively as a lawyer, arbitrator, or both, see Arbitration: Major Experience.

His experience as an arbitrator has made him an oft-invited speaker and author to fellow arbitrators and to arbitration users alike. See Publications.

McArthur’s work as an arbitrator builds on his early years as a lawyer. He joined Houston’s Susman Godfrey, then a small 12-lawyer trial boutique, as one of its earliest lawyers in 1983 after a year’s clerkship and became a partner.

In his first jury trial, McArthur was one of two main lawyers who tried a take-or-pay case to a state-court jury and secured a $536 million verdict in Houston. The case later settled for $300 million plus the transfer of $100 million acreage.

In the 2000s, McArthur was a partner at San Francisco’s Hosie McArthur LLP, a firm whose docket was dominated by IP and oil and gas matters. Hosie McArthur represented two of the main oil producing states, Alaska and Louisiana, in oil and gas matters, and the State of Hawai’i in an antitrust gasoline pricing case.

In his last trial, an administrative trial in 2012 after he already had shifted his main focus to arbitration, McArthur successfully defended the State of Alaska against an oil producer’s effort to reallocate over six million barrels of oil (worth over $600 million at the time) from state land to federal land in a unique state/federal unit. Having spent his early years on cases like these has given McArthur deeper experience to apply as an arbitrator of commercial disputes.

McArthur’s approach to arbitration and suggestions to parties on certain key issues they often face when in arbitration are posted on this website under the link Arbitration: Arbitration’s Advantages.

Get in Touch Now!