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O Recurso Especial nº 904.813/PR, julgado pela Terceira Turma do Superior Tribunal de Justiça em 20 de outubro de 2011, teve como relatora a Ministra Nancy Andrighi (BRASIL, 2011).
O caso envolveu a Companhia Paranaense de Gás Natural (COMPAGAS) e um consórcio contratado para a execução de obras. Após o surgimento de controvérsias, as partes celebraram compromisso arbitral, embora não houvesse previsão de arbitragem no edital de licitação ou no contrato original. A COMPAGAS, posteriormente, ajuizou ação declaratória de nulidade do compromisso arbitral.
A Ministra Nancy Andrighi decidiu que:
A arbitragem envolvendo a Administração Pública no Brasil percorreu um longo caminho, desde a inicial resistência doutrinária e jurisprudencial até a consolidação como instrumento legítimo e eficaz de resolução de controvérsias. A reforma da Lei de Arbitragem, em 2015, representou um marco legislativo fundamental, ao positivar expressamente a possibilidade de utilização da arbitragem pelo Estado e ao estabelecer regras específicas que compatibilizam o instituto com os princípios do direito administrativo.
Ao longo deste artigo, buscou-se responder às questões centrais que ainda permeiam o tema. Em relação à aplicação do princípio da legalidade, concluiu-se que a arbitragem não representa uma renúncia à legalidade, mas sim uma escolha, autorizada por lei, de um foro distinto para a solução de litígios. A exigência de que a arbitragem seja sempre "de direito" e respeite o princípio da publicidade são garantias de que o Estado continuará submetido ao império da lei, mesmo em um procedimento privado.
Quanto à arbitrabilidade objetiva e subjetiva, ficou demonstrado que a participação da Administração Pública na arbitragem depende de autorização legal e de manifestação de vontade inequívoca, conforme destacado no julgamento do CC nº 151.130/SP (BRASIL, 2019). Além disso, apenas litígios relativos a direitos patrimoniais disponíveis podem ser arbitrados, excluindo-se matérias que envolvam o exercício do poder de império do Estado.
Os impactos da presença de entidades públicas na condução do procedimento arbitral foram analisados, destacando-se a não aplicação das prerrogativas processuais da Fazenda Pública no juízo arbitral, os limites da competência-competência quando há dúvida sobre a vinculação do ente público, e a necessidade de harmonizar publicidade e eficiência.
A comparação entre as arbitragens domésticas e as arbitragens de investimentos revelou diferenças substanciais entre os dois modelos, especialmente no que tange à base jurídica, às partes envolvidas e ao grau de controle estatal sobre o procedimento. A posição peculiar do Brasil, com sua relutância em aderir ao sistema ICSID e a adoção dos ACFIs, reflete uma preocupação com a preservação da soberania e do espaço regulatório do Estado.
Por fim, a análise dos precedentes do Superior Tribunal de Justiça demonstrou a importância da jurisprudência na delimitação dos contornos práticos da arbitragem pública. Os casos estudados reforçam a necessidade de manifestação de vontade clara e inequívoca do ente público, a compatibilidade da arbitragem com a Constituição Federal, e a flexibilidade para a celebração de compromissos arbitrais mesmo após a celebração do contrato.
Em síntese, a arbitragem consolidou-se como uma ferramenta valiosa para a Administração Pública, oferecendo celeridade, especialização técnica e segurança jurídica. Contudo, sua utilização deve ser sempre pautada pelo respeito aos princípios do direito administrativo, especialmente a legalidade, a publicidade e a indisponibilidade do interesse público primário. Os desafios remanescentes, como a definição mais precisa dos limites da arbitrabilidade objetiva e a harmonização das prerrogativas públicas com a eficiência arbitral, deverão ser enfrentados pela doutrina e pela jurisprudência nos próximos anos, à medida que a prática da arbitragem pública se consolida no Brasil.
Technical Evidence in Brazilian Arbitration: The Need to Move Beyond the Judicial Mindset

How Brazilian arbitration can evolve beyond traditional judicial practices and adopt a more efficient, sophisticated and strategically integrated approach to technical evidence.
Por Daniel Aquino
Brazilian arbitration has grown impressively over the last two decades. It is now a well-established forum for corporate, construction, infrastructure, energy, public contract and post-M&A disputes. Parties choose arbitration not only because of confidentiality or specialization, but also because of the expectation that the procedure will be more flexible and more efficient than ordinary court litigation.
That expectation, however, is not always fulfilled.
One of the areas where this tension becomes most visible is the production of technical evidence. In many domestic arbitrations, the evidentiary structure still reflects the logic of Brazilian court proceedings: a tribunal-appointed expert, party-appointed technical assistants, questions submitted by the parties, a written expert report and subsequent comments by the assistants.
This model is familiar to Brazilian lawyers. It is also legally coherent within judicial proceedings. But familiarity should not be confused with necessity.
Arbitration does not need to reproduce the judicial model simply because the parties, counsel and experts are used to it. The procedural flexibility of arbitration exists precisely to allow the tribunal and the parties to adapt the production of evidence to the real needs of the dispute.
The recent discussions promoted by the ICC Brazil Task Force on Expert Evidence in Arbitration are therefore particularly relevant. They draw attention to a practical problem that many users of arbitration already recognize: the excessive reliance on tribunal-appointed experts may add time, cost and procedural complexity to disputes that were supposed to be handled more efficiently.
This does not mean that tribunal-appointed experts have no place in arbitration. They can be extremely useful in specific cases, especially where the tribunal needs neutral technical support, where the issues are highly specialized, or where the parties’ expert evidence is so fragmented that an independent technical assessment becomes necessary.
The concern is different. The appointment of a tribunal-appointed expert should be a deliberate procedural choice, not an automatic reflex inherited from litigation.
When the tribunal-appointed expert becomes the default solution, the arbitration may begin to resemble a private version of a court case. The procedure becomes longer, the number of submissions increases, and the technical debate often shifts away from the parties’ own experts toward the report prepared by the expert appointed by the tribunal. In some cases, there is also a subtle risk that the decision-making process becomes overly dependent on the conclusions of that expert.
A more sophisticated approach requires a change in how party-appointed experts are perceived.
In Brazilian practice, the expression “technical assistant” is closely associated with the Code of Civil Procedure. It suggests a professional who supports one party and comments on the work of the court-appointed expert. In arbitration, this role should be broader. The party-appointed expert should not be seen merely as an assistant reacting to someone else’s report, but as an expert capable of assisting the arbitral tribunal directly through independent, clear and methodologically sound analysis.
This is not just a semantic point. Language matters because it reflects procedural culture.
If the expert appointed by a party is treated only as a partisan assistant, the tribunal will naturally tend to give less weight to that evidence and may feel more inclined to appoint its own expert. If, on the other hand, party-appointed experts are expected to act with independence, disclose assumptions, address weaknesses, identify alternative scenarios and engage directly with the opposing expert’s analysis, their contribution becomes much more valuable to the tribunal.
That is closer to the practice commonly seen in international arbitration.
In that environment, expert evidence is often built around written expert reports, reply reports, meetings between experts, joint statements identifying areas of agreement and disagreement, cross-examination and, in some cases, concurrent evidence procedures. The purpose is not to eliminate disagreement. Disagreement is natural in complex technical matters. The purpose is to make the disagreement intelligible.
For arbitral tribunals, that is crucial.
In a construction dispute, for example, the relevant issue may not be simply whether there was delay, but which delay events were critical, how they interacted with each other, whether there was concurrent delay, and what methodology was used to allocate responsibility. In a damages case, the central question may be whether the loss calculation is based on reliable assumptions, whether the counterfactual scenario is defensible, and whether the methodology separates contractual loss from ordinary business risk. In a valuation dispute, the difference between two conclusions may depend less on arithmetic and more on discount rates, projected cash flows, comparables, market assumptions and treatment of contingencies.
These are not issues that should be addressed only at the end of the procedure.
Technical evidence should be considered early. In many disputes, the technical analysis helps define the legal strategy itself. It may affect the framing of claims, the identification of causation, the assessment of quantum and even the decision whether to settle, mediate or proceed to a final award.
This requires more from counsel, experts and tribunals.
Counsel should involve technical experts earlier, before the case theory becomes rigid. Experts should be selected not only based on reputation or price, but also on their ability to explain complex issues with clarity, withstand scrutiny and maintain credibility under pressure. Tribunals should manage technical evidence actively, narrowing the issues in dispute and avoiding unnecessary duplication of reports.
The expert, in turn, must understand that credibility is the central asset.
A party-appointed expert is not an advocate wearing technical clothes. The expert may be appointed by one party, but the analysis must be capable of standing before the tribunal. That means working with transparent assumptions, recognized methodologies and intellectual honesty. It also means acknowledging limits when necessary. An expert who refuses to recognize any weakness in the appointing party’s case may appear loyal in the short term, but often becomes less persuasive.
The practical point is simple: good expert evidence does not merely support a position. It helps the tribunal understand why that position is technically sound.
This shift is especially important in Brazil because many of the disputes submitted to arbitration involve technically dense matters: infrastructure, engineering, public contracts, shareholder disputes, accounting issues, economic-financial imbalance, valuation, damages and complex contractual performance. In these cases, legal argument and technical analysis cannot be treated as separate worlds.
They must be integrated.
That is where the Brazilian market appears to be moving. The discussion is no longer limited to whether a party has a technical assistant. The real question is whether the party has a credible expert strategy: early technical diagnosis, clear scope, defensible methodology, coordination between legal and technical teams, preparation for hearings, and capacity to explain the dispute in a way that is useful to the tribunal.
For institutions and professionals involved in dispute resolution, this is an important moment.
The improvement of technical evidence in Brazilian arbitration is not a matter of importing foreign practices without adaptation. It is about using the flexibility of arbitration more intelligently. Brazilian arbitration does not need to abandon its legal culture, but it should avoid unnecessary procedural habits when they make the process slower, more expensive and less focused.
At SWOT Global Consulting, this debate is directly connected to our work in complex disputes. Technical evidence must be treated not as a procedural afterthought, but as an essential part of case construction. That requires integrated teams, independence, methodological consistency and the ability to translate complex technical findings into clear conclusions for arbitral tribunals, courts and negotiation environments.
Brazilian arbitration has already proved its value. The next challenge is to ensure that its evidentiary practices evolve with the same level of sophistication.
In that process, the quality of expert evidence will matter as much as the quality of the legal argument.
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