"Give me a seat where the money cannot move."

That, says Tariq Khan, is what a business wants from an arbitration jurisdiction. It is also why he no longer believes another amendment to the Arbitration Act will make India a hub.

Khan is Partner and Head of International Disputes at M&Co Legal, Dubai, which he joined after stints at Advani & Co in Delhi and the International Arbitration and Mediation Centre (IAMC) in Hyderabad.

Dr. Mahmood Hussain is the firm's Founding Partner. A former DLA Piper lawyer, he was the first deputy registrar of the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) courts, at a time when there was no building to house them and no book on how to build a court.

In this conversation with Bar & Bench's Pallavi Saluja, the two discuss injunctions listed overnight, costs orders that make losing parties think twice and why a UAE-seated award still faces hurdles in India.

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Edited excerpts follow.

Pallavi Saluja (PS): Tariq, you moved from being a Partner at Advani & Co in Delhi to IAMC Hyderabad and now you head the international disputes practice at M&Co Dubai. What did working across these institutions teach you?

Tariq Khan (TK): Delhi is very competitive, with one of the best-established arbitration landscapes in the country. Working with Hiroo Advani, I learned that a boutique can punch well above its weight if the partner in the room actually knows the file. That discipline, knowing your case better than anyone else in the hearing, has stayed with me.

Hyderabad brought out the entrepreneur in me. Building an institution from the ground up teaches you things no client matter ever will — how to set KPIs, how to think in years rather than briefs, how to make yourself relevant to an ecosystem rather than simply visible within it. It also gave me something I had not expected: a window into commercial depth that the Delhi-Mumbai circuit had largely ignored. Pharmaceuticals, technology, infrastructure — sectors with enormous dispute potential and almost no specialist arbitration counsel willing to plant a flag there. Hyderabad showed me that the most interesting work does not always come from the most established addresses.

Dubai is where jurisdictions collide. The work I was doing in India, despite all the “international” branding around arbitration weeks, was largely domestic. In Dubai, I handle disputes touching Djibouti and Bosnia, navigate Swiss law one day and French or UAE law the next, and appear across both the DIFC and the Abu Dhabi Global Market. Dubai has taught me to think internationally and to see what a true ecosystem actually looks like from the inside.

PS: Dr. Mahmood, you set up as a domestic law firm in Dubai and now it is an international law firm. How did you grow your firm? What were the challenges and what would you suggest to somebody else who wants to set up an international practice there?

Dr. Mahmood Hussain (MH): Most lawyers learn the craft of law but not management, which is a separate discipline. So the mistakes one firm makes get repeated at the next. Some firms internationally brought in a CEO from outside the field. But it is very difficult for an outsider to tell fee-earners - partners who have been doing the same thing for years - what to do. So my advice to lawyers is to start somewhere different, in-house, for instance.

I spent six years as company secretary at a telecom company, sitting in on strategy, finance, audit and procurement discussions. That shaped me as a manager. I later became Head of Legal Strategy and Justice at the Prime Minister's Office and then the first deputy registrar of the DIFC courts. All of that gave me a sense of where I wanted to take a firm before I started one.

One thing I'd tell young lawyers: business development, marketing and sales are three different things. You don't go to a conference thinking, "I need business out of this." You go to build your profile and your network. That generates the work later.

Before starting, I did a gap analysis. The market was divided: small local firms doing only local litigation and big international firms doing everything except litigation. We wanted to bridge that gap. Moving from the mainland to the DIFC was a big decision. We wanted to send the message that the DIFC is not only for international firms. Today, we have more cases there than any other firm, including the international ones.

You need an objective, you need to track what you are investing, and you need to be patient. Building takes time.

PS: You mentioned the DIFC - You were its first deputy registrar when the courts were being set up. What were those early days like?

Dr. Mahmood: Very challenging. There's no book that tells you how to build a court. We didn't even have a building at first. We worked out of small offices while figuring out whether to start with the rules, the laws or the physical infrastructure. Because we had Singaporean and English judges involved, we tried to avoid the inefficiencies of traditional common law systems when drafting the rules.

About 90 percent of DIFC cases now conclude within 12 months. A further 5 percent take up to 18 months and the most complex take around two years.

The local courts have since started learning from the DIFC too. The registrar system, for instance, where a registrar handles the early procedural stages so that judges aren't spending time on preparation, was imported from the DIFC into the local system.

PS: You spoke about the local courts learning from the DIFC Courts. What can India adopt when it comes to arbitration-related litigation?

Dr. Mahmood: One thing the DIFC does well is constantly assess and revise its rules. If something isn't efficient, we change it and we bring in practitioners to consult on why. India could also adopt a document-based, fast-track process for cases below a certain value. The DIFC also uses - judicial officers practitioners brought in to help the court handle smaller, non-complex cases. That alone would expedite India's justice system considerably.

TK: I would add that India can genuinely learn from the relationship between speed and certainty. Let me give you an example. We got instructions from an Indian client at around 5 PM on an urgent matter, the takeover of a facility in Abu Dhabi. By 6:30 PM, we had mentioned it to the court and by the next morning, it was listed for 11:30 AM. We prepared bundles, witness statements and skeleton arguments overnight, and I argued the matter for about two and a half hours. We got an injunction, a fairly unique one, allowing my client to continue operating the plant on the same terms. All of this within 18 hours of first contact.

The second big learning is costs following the event. In India, frivolous litigation is far too easy to file and gets entertained. In the DIFC, if you lose a challenge, you pay the other side's costs, often 80 to 100 percent of them. For example in an anti-suit injunction I argued recently, we were awarded AED 185,000 in costs for and there was one appearance - roughly ₹50 lakh. In a separate contempt matter that I argued, the contemnor was directed to pay a penalty of $350,000 for breach of court orders.

That deterrence doesn't really exist in India, which is partly why nearly every arbitral award gets challenged there. In the DIFC cases, I tell clients honestly that a challenge to an arbitral award won't go anywhere unless there is something serious which is against the public policy, because I know the cost consequences will be real. That predictability and deterrence changes how people litigate.

PS: Dr. Mahmood, geopolitics is shifting and so is technology. Beyond the traditional disputes, what are you seeing in the region?

Dr. Mahmood: What is happening now is both a geopolitical change and a technology change. Take energy - in 2025, roughly $500 billion was expected to be invested in oil and gas, with gas taking a growing share, while spending on clean energy and the technology behind it rose to around $1.2 trillion. That shift changes the dynamics of disputes: less oil and gas, more clean energy.

The other driver is geopolitical. After the war in the Middle East and the Gulf, the repairs alone are estimated at $550 billion. More than 30 refinery sites were affected, upstream, midstream and downstream. Some repairs will take a year, others three to five years.

All of that brings a different type of dispute. Force majeure is one area and we are already seeing it in the notices our clients receive. There are real challenges here for the legal mind. Qatar declared force majeure, but was there a force majeure event when the country was not itself in a declared war? Lawyers and judges need to interpret that. Delay, damage, insurance and risk allocation will all come together and dictate the type of disputes we see.

If you look at the caseload of institutions like the SCC and the ICC, 35 to 40 percent of their disputes are already energy or energy infrastructure related. And now we have AI. Data centres need a lot of energy, which means more substations and more new projects, including small nuclear stations and other clean technologies placed in different parts of the world. These are not oil and gas disputes; they are technology disputes. The shift is towards clean energy.

PS: Let's talk about enforcement, which is where theory meets reality. Walk us through what actually happens when a UAE award has to be enforced in India, and vice versa.

TK: This is where India is lagging behind. We were among the early signatories to the New York Convention, but we have somehow lost our way on enforcement. Section 44(b) of the Arbitration Act says, the Indian Government has to notify in the Official Gazette that such a state is a party to the New York Convention, specifying that an award passed by such a state shall be enforceable in India.. That has not been done for the UAE. So an award seated in the UAE, will face challenges. It makes things more difficult and complex.

It also creates a tension with India’s own obligations under the New York Convention. Once you have signed, you are meant to recognise and enforce awards from other contracting states. India may have invoked the reciprocity reservation but then the UAE has not been notified. That is not a legal complexity. It is an administrative failure with commercial consequences.

As for enforcement of judgments coming to the UAE, the first thing I always tell my team is to look whether a treaty exists. India and the UAE have one, from 1999. It is an agreement between two countries, so the courts respect it and enforce easily.

Where there is no treaty, the DIFC Courts apply common law principles to recognition. They are not a replica of English law, they have their own statutes and procedural rules, but the recognition test will be familiar to any common law practitioner: the originating court had jurisdiction, service was properly effected, due process and natural justice were observed and the judgment is final and conclusive. For a monetary judgment that satisfies those requirements, recognition is ordinarily straightforward.

The practical consequence is significant. If the assets are in the UAE and you bring me an Indian judgment, my first step maybe to go through the DIFC Courts. Once recognised there, I take that DIFC judgment to the onshore courts for execution. The onshore courts do not go behind a judgment the DIFC has already recognised and their role at that stage is enforcement, not re-examination.

This route is particularly valuable where the original judgment contains elements that an onshore court might find difficult i.e. a high contractual interest rate, a non-signatory brought into proceedings, a complex joinder structure. The onshore courts apply UAE law and their own interpretive instincts. The DIFC Courts, as a common law forum, understand these issues in the same register as the court that gave the judgment. Get recognition there first. Then take it onshore and attach the assets. The sequencing is the strategy.

Dr. Mahmood: One thing people miss is that enforcement is a legal mechanism, but it has an economic impact. I was recently reading an IMF study showing that countries with a good enforcement regime, a good arbitration regime and an efficient judicial system attract more investment than those without. That matters to us in this part of the world. The UAE receives more than $50 billion in foreign direct investment. We have not reached India's level because India is a big market, but for our size it is good. Why? Because we have a very liberal regime when it comes to enforcement.

Tariq spoke about the DIFC. As a litigant, you have options, because you can also go to the local courts. Both are efficient, so it comes down to cost: the DIFC is more expensive and the local courts less so. In the local courts, the judge issues an execution order within 48 hours. You don't go through a trial; you go straight to the execution judge. If the other side wants to challenge it, they go to appeal and that is fast too, but it does not stop me from executing. If they want a stay, the judges are very strict. I have seen them say, "It's a big amount; bring us a manager's cheque," which the court holds in custody. Then we know you are serious.

A good enforcement regime also makes people trust your lawyers and your legal system, and that is good business. When you are a good seat, hearings happen in your city. Venues are booked, transcribers are hired, lawyers and witnesses fly in and stay in hotels. That is the economic impact India has to think about.

PS: Where are Indian parties defaulting to in UAE-India contracts? Are they moving towards SIAC, the LCIA or DIAC?

Dr. Mahmood: Seven to ten years ago, it mostly went to SIAC, largely because of the notification. Today, Indian parties have started to trust the UAE system more.

Why? Because the UAE gives them something other jurisdictions cannot. If a client is comfortable with his Indian lawyer, he can bring that lawyer to handle the arbitration, especially if the governing law is Indian. And if the matter goes to the DIFC Courts because the seat is the DIFC, he can still bring in his Indian counsel to argue it there. In our firm, for example, Tariq has rights of audience. So the client can control the whole chain, right through to enforcement.

We are seeing more cases coming to DIAC, and in a lot of them, the seat is the DIFC. We have also seen a trend towards the ICC and Hong Kong. Indian parties are choosing the UAE because it is very flexible for them. The language is English, the judicial system is similar and they can bring their own lawyers to work alongside others.

And there are good Indian lawyers here, like Tariq, who broke the glass ceiling. He was among the first Indians to come and practise in the DIFC. He broke the taboo when he started to argue there and it sent a message: this is not an English court; this is an international court, with judges from different jurisdictions.

A lot of the parties are from India, so we can represent them very well. And when a dispute raises a question about a treaty between the UAE and India, who is better placed to argue it than Indian lawyers or Emirati lawyers?

PS: Tariq, you have written extensively on reforming Indian arbitration law and on the arbitration ecosystem in India. Now that you are looking at it from the outside, sitting in Dubai, has your prescription changed?

TK: I think you already know the answer, because I recently wrote for Bar & Bench that the conversation about whether India will become an arbitration hub is the problem itself. The problem is not just the legislation and it cannot be solved by arbitration weeks and arbitration days, which many practitioners feel will change the culture. Amending the law every four or five years is not the solution either.

The solution, in my view, is predictability and understanding business. When I enter into a contract, I don't want to study the country's arbitration law. Somebody will tell me that if I choose the DIFC as a seat, interim measures may be granted immediately, worldwide freezing orders are issued in no time and the judgment debtor may be asked to disclose assets. As a business, I will say: give me a seat where the money cannot move.

The problem with us as Indian lawyers is that the enforcement conversation starts only after you win the award. By then, the assets are gone. Businesses today arrive informed. They have done their research on seat selection before the first call. They want to know how to secure assets before invoking arbitration, not after.

The DIFC Courts support that. Article 15(4) of the DIFC Courts Law, which came in 2025, lets you ask the court for a worldwide freezing order in support of any proceedings, current or future, even where there is no connection to the DIFC. The local UAE courts have precautionary attachment as a remedy to protect movement of assets.

That is what India lacks most. Section 9 exists, but interim relief in Indian courts i.e. ex parte freezing orders, immediate asset disclosure, orders that land before the other side has time to act, remains unpredictable in practice. That is not a competence problem. Indian judges are exceptional. The constraint is structural: a caseload that no individual judge, however capable, can absorb at the pace that urgent commercial relief demands.

The adjournment culture compounds this. In the past year I have appeared more than ten times before the DIFC Courts. I have not seen adjournment requests being entertained. In India, adjournments are almost a procedural right and I say this without blaming the judiciary. When a court is carrying thousands of matters, the system bends to accommodate volume. The solution is not cultural exhortation. It is more judges, dedicated commercial benches, and legislation that stops routing every arbitration-related application through three successive stages before anything is actually decided.

For international arbitration specifically, India should look seriously at specialist judicial infrastructure something analogous to what the DIFC has built, whether in GIFT City or elsewhere. Judges drawn from senior arbitration practitioners, with fixed timelines and a commercial rather than procedural instinct. The DIFC Courts work because the judges understand what is at stake commercially, not just legally. That combination is rare and it has to be deliberately constructed.

One point that often goes unsaid: the bar needs to meet the bench halfway. If Indian counsel want to appear in these courts and they should, because the work is here, they need to understand that what succeeds in Delhi does not automatically succeed in Dubai. In these courts, aggression reads as weakness. Volume substitutes for nothing. What works is precision, a skeleton that gets to the point, an oral argument that answers the question the judge is actually asking and a willingness to concede what cannot be won so that what matters is taken seriously. That is a different discipline and it has to be learned.

Lastly, India has everything it needs except the one thing that cannot be legislated: the collective decision to stop competing with each other and start competing with Singapore. That decision does not require a new law. It requires will.

Dr. Mahmood: Hopefully that will come. I agree with him. The UAE has become the third most favoured seat, and India has to reach that level. India's advantage is also its disadvantage. It is a vast country with diverse cultures. But, as Tariq said, you need one strong institution for arbitration and it has to be India, not city by city. People outside don't know whether you are from Hyderabad, Delhi or Mumbai. You are Indian and this is your legal system.

The arbitration weeks are a good start. You meet your peers, you see best practice, you educate lawyers and influence judges. I have read a lot of Indian judgments and quoted some in my PhD. On public policy, the judges have strong views and real intellectual capability. Slowly, it will build.

Costs, for one. Cost recovery has to be 85 to 100 percent. And look at the UAE's local courts: not every case goes to appeal and not every case goes to cassation. There are financial thresholds and they keep raising them. They have also created a layer of review to check whether a case is serious enough for appeal and they are now learning from the DIFC on cost recovery.

You have a talented legal system, good lawyers, good judges and good legislators. But they are small pieces of a mosaic. You haven't put them together in one place to say, "This is the beautiful picture of India." Showcase that to the world and India can be among the top three or five seats internationally.