In arbitration the parties appoint their own financial experts and the tribunal weighs the competing reports; before the onshore UAE courts the court appoints a single expert from the Ministry of Justice roster and that report usually becomes the number in the judgment. The same dispute therefore calls for a different report depending on the forum: an arbitration report argues a position to a tribunal that expects to hear the other side's expert, while a court report answers questions the court itself set. Deciding the forum before commissioning the work avoids paying for a report in the wrong form.
Who Appoints, and What That Changes
Before the onshore courts, appointment is by court order from the roster maintained under Federal Decree-Law No. 21 of 2022 Regulating the Profession of Experts before Judicial Authorities, and the expert answers to the court alone. The procedure is set by Part 10 of Federal Decree-Law No. 35 of 2022 on Evidence, Articles 109 to 125: the mandate, the meetings, the initial report and comment period, the filing, and the court's power to question the expert or appoint another.
In arbitration none of that applies by default. Article 3 of Decree-Law No. 21 of 2022 expressly allows arbitration centres and local judicial authorities to regulate experts under their own rules, and Article 4(2) allows litigants to agree on an expert who is not on the federal roster. The tribunal's procedural orders and the applicable institutional rules govern instead.
Arbitration: Party Experts Are the Norm
Under the DIAC Arbitration Rules 2022, and in institutional arbitration generally, each side instructs its own expert and serves a report on the timetable the tribunal fixes. That is not a fallback; it is the ordinary route for expert evidence.
The consequence for the work is significant. A party expert in arbitration knows the report will be read alongside a competing report by an equally qualified expert instructed by the other side. Method has to be defensible in a way that survives that comparison, and figures asserted without a documented basis are exposed immediately rather than merely discounted.
It also changes what a good report looks like. Before a court, an expert answers referred questions and stops. In arbitration, the report has to explain the methodology, justify the choice between recognised approaches, and address the assumptions the other side is likely to challenge, because the tribunal will be asked to choose between two coherent analyses rather than to accept one.
Cost follows the same logic. Two experts producing full reports, meeting, and attending a hearing is materially more expensive than one court appointment, and the expense sits with the parties throughout rather than being fixed by a court and allocated at the end. The trade is control: you choose your expert, define the scope, and see the analysis before deciding whether to deploy it.
Joint Meetings and Joint Statements
The most useful procedural device in arbitration has no equivalent in onshore court practice. Tribunals commonly direct the party experts to meet, without counsel, and produce a joint statement setting out what they agree on and what they do not, with reasons for each disagreement.
The effect is to narrow the dispute to the points that actually matter. Two experts examining the same accounts usually agree on most of the arithmetic and differ on a handful of assumptions: the discount rate, the treatment of a contested contract, the period over which a loss runs. A joint statement isolates those, and the tribunal then decides a small number of defined questions instead of choosing between two long documents.
For a client this is also the point of greatest exposure. An expert who has overstated a figure will be asked to defend it to another expert before the hearing, and concessions made in a joint statement are on the record.
Tribunal-Appointed Experts
A tribunal may also appoint its own expert. Article 34 of Federal Law No. 6 of 2018 on Arbitration governs this: unless the parties agree otherwise, the tribunal may appoint one or more experts and fixes their task and the time allowed. Before accepting, the expert must submit a statement of qualifications together with an acknowledgment of impartiality and independence, and the parties may object only within the period the tribunal sets, or afterwards only on grounds they learned later.
The article also fixes what happens to the report. The tribunal sends the parties a copy and gives them time to comment, and a hearing may be held at which the expert is questioned. Article 34(6) preserves the parties' right to put forward their own experts on the points the report covers, subject to Article 33, so a tribunal appointment supplements the party evidence rather than replacing it. Fees are as the tribunal decides under Article 34(7).
Tribunals use this where the party experts have diverged so far that neither is usable, or where a discrete technical question can be resolved more cheaply by one appointment than by two. The report of a tribunal-appointed expert is closer in function to a court expert's report, but it does not displace the party evidence and the parties retain the right to comment on it.
DIFC, ADGM, and Onshore
The DIFC Courts and the ADGM Courts are separate court systems, not arbitration, and they operate under their own procedural frameworks: the DIFC Courts Rules and the ADGM Courts procedural rules. Expert evidence there follows those rules rather than the federal Evidence Law, and registration on the federal roster does not confer eligibility before them.
The practical point is that a UAE dispute may sit in any of four places, each with a different expert regime: onshore courts, DIFC Courts, ADGM Courts, or arbitration under an institution such as DIAC. Establishing which one governs is the first question, not a detail.
One consequence deserves stating for anyone moving between the two systems. An expert who works mainly before the onshore courts is accustomed to answering a fixed mandate and to a report that is not cross-examined in the same way. Arbitration requires the same rigour plus the ability to defend the method live, in the joint meeting and at the hearing. The analysis does not change; the presentation and the preparation do.
Language
Proceedings before the onshore courts are conducted in Arabic and the expert report is filed in Arabic, with legal translation of supporting documents in other languages. Arbitration proceeds in the language of the agreement, which in international matters is usually English, and the DIFC and ADGM Courts operate in English.
This is a budgeting question as much as a linguistic one. A report prepared in English for an arbitration, if the dispute later reaches the onshore courts for enforcement or a parallel claim, needs legal translation of the report and its exhibits, and the translated text is what the court reads.
Enforcement Brings You Back Onshore
An arbitral award is not self-executing. Enforcement in the UAE runs through the onshore courts, which is where an award-based figure meets the court system the arbitration was designed to avoid.
The financial consequence is worth planning for. A figure that is clearly derived, tied to identified documents, and expressed so that its components can be separated will survive an enforcement application more comfortably than a single global sum whose composition is opaque. Building the report that way costs nothing at the time and saves argument later.
The same discipline helps if the dispute is settled rather than decided. A figure whose components are separately supported can be traded down line by line in a negotiation, because each element has its own evidence. A single global number can only be accepted or rejected, which tends to produce a split-the-difference outcome that reflects neither side's analysis.
How AABDxb Helps
AABDxb prepares financial expert reports for both routes: as a Ministry of Justice registered court-appointed accounting expert where the onshore courts appoint, and as a party-appointed expert in arbitration, including joint expert meetings and joint statements. Reports are prepared in Arabic or English according to the forum, and the same analysis is presented in the form the tribunal or the court expects.