Arent van Wassenaer.

For more than three decades Arent van Wassenaer was one of the best-known projects and construction lawyers in the Netherlands — a partner at Houthoff, at Norton Rose Fulbright, and at Allen & Overy in Amsterdam, with a broad international track record and a reputation as a strategic thinker.

He now works exclusively as a neutral. Through The Faithful Goose, founded in 2016, he is appointed as chair of dispute avoidance and adjudication boards, as arbitrator, as mediator, and as a facilitator on major construction and infrastructure projects across Europe and beyond.

His conviction — formed over forty years of watching how disputes arise and how they resolve — is that most are avoidable. A project governed well, with clear risk allocation and a standing neutral present from the outset, rarely reaches a hearing. The work is to build that governance, and, when a dispute does arise, to resolve it with rigour and finality.

He sits as an arbitrator with the ICC International Court of Arbitration, the Netherlands Arbitration Institute and the Netherlands Board of Construction Arbitration, and has served as a Deputy Judge in the Courts of Appeal of Arnhem-Leeuwarden and The Hague.

He is the author of A Practical Guide to Successful Construction Projects (Routledge) — a practitioner's book on project structure, risk, and the governance conditions that allow large projects to complete without destructive conflict. On his retirement from Allen & Overy, colleagues marked his career with a Liber Amicorum, Van het Gebaande Pad — “Off the beaten track.”