My friend Luke Peterson, the founder of Investment Arbitration Reporter, passed this along:
Investment Arbitration Reporter is looking for one or more persons to join our team of freelance contributors.
IAReporter offers specialized reporting and analysis of developments in the field of international investment law, and when relevant it focuses on public international law and international commercial arbitration (primarily cases involving state entities).
We are seeking contributors who can review and write about legal and policy developments with a high level of technical accuracy, and in the existing style of IAReporter.
Any work for IAReporter would be on a remote consultant basis (i.e., contributors would work from wherever they are legal residents and authorized to work).
Ideally, in their initial months working with us, contributors should have at least 25 hours per month to devote on a flexible basis. Talented contributors will be invited to work more intensively over time, and there may be eventual scope for employment on a part-time or full-time basis. However, it is important to note that we are unable to offer full-time or even half-time hours at the outset of your relationship with us.
Our dream candidate is someone who is pursuing a PhD, raising a family, writing a novel, or who is otherwise somewhat busy with other pursuits – but who still has sufficient time and flexibility to work with us in a meaningful fashion.
Who Should Apply?
Desired qualities include:
- Fluency in English and preferably at least one other language.
- Advanced background in international law and arbitration, or a related field.
- Exceptionally strong writing skills in English, preferably journalistic in nature.
- Prior familiarity with IAReporter and its style of writing.
- Humility and lack of ego when it comes to having your work edited or revised.
- Flexible work-life schedule, because assignments arise at various times and contributors may need to cover them on short notice. We don’t expect you to always say “yes” to new assignments that have same-day or next-day deadlines, but we want you to have the flexibility to take on some work of this type on a regular basis.
Who Should Not Apply?
- For conflict-of-interest purposes, we ask our contributors to not practice in the field of investor-state arbitration while they work with us. Thus, if you aim to be practising or clerking for an arbitrator within the next 2-3 years, we politely discourage you from applying. If you are currently practising, please explain in your application letter when you are planning to discontinue such work. Otherwise, your application is likely to be filtered out before deeper review.
- If you lack strong familiarity with IAReporter, it is not likely that your application will meet with success.
- If you are presently enrolled in a first law degree (i.e. BA or LLB), we also discourage you from applying at this juncture. Past experience indicates that such candidates typically lack sufficient experience necessary to be successful contributors.
- Since much of our daily news/editorial activity takes place during Western European/US East Coast working hours, candidates in Asia-Pacific locations might find it difficult to find a footing in our workflow – unless they are extreme night-owls.
What Do We Pay?
For a 6-month probationary period, any successful applicant will be paid a rate of $60 (US) per hour for assignments. For the next 6 months, contributors will be paid a rate of $70 (US) per hour. (Further rate increases are anticipated.)
Trial Assignment
Interested candidates must complete a trial assignment: a summary of the Perenco v. Ecuador Jurisdictional Decision in the style of IAReporter. (We covered this decision in a cursory fashion back in 2011, but we are now seeking a more detailed review of the decision.)
Your draft should offer a concise account of the essential facts, a description of the key legal holdings and reasoning, as well as a small amount of analysis that contextualizes any of the holdings against the backdrop of other international jurisprudence.
The trial assignment should be less than 2000 words and take less than 8 hours to complete. Please do not ask a friend or colleague to review or edit your draft. We want to see your work only, as it is you who will be doing subsequent assignments for IAReporter – and your performance should match the quality of your initial application.
We also request a CV and a short cover letter (less than 500 words, please). The cover letter should clarify your plans and aspirations for the next several years, so that we can understand how your part-time work with IAReporter would fit into the larger picture. Your application package should be submitted to [email protected]. We prefer all materials to be shared as MS Word files or Google Docs that are unlocked and editable.
Deadline/Next Steps
The deadline for applications is 9 PM Eastern Standard Time on Sunday October 8, 2023.
All trial assignments (i.e. reviews of the Perenco v Ecuador decision) will be reviewed on a blind basis by our team, so that the strength of the applicant’s work (rather than their CV or cover letter) determines whether they are short-listed. In mid October, we will contact short-listed applicants whom we wish to interview.
Please note that we are unable to honour requests for temporary access to IAReporter’s website in order that potential applicants can familiarize themselves with our work. If you are a student and your institution does not subscribe, we may be able to offer a free trial to your library. Ask your library to email us at [email protected]. However it is unlikely that this trial would be activated fast enough for you to participate in this year’s contributor competition.
