Newsletter-21

194 NEWSLETTER 2016 Pursuant to the Preamble of the Rules, parties and arbitral tribu- nals may adopt the Rules in whole, or in part, to govern the proceed- ings. The rules may also be used as a guideline to develop the parties’ own procedures. Pursuant to Art. 1.5 of the Rules, if the Rules and the institutional, ad hoc, or other rules that apply to the conduct of the arbitration are silent on any matter concerning the taking of evidence, the arbitral tribunal shall conduct the taking of evidence as it deems appropriate, in accordance with the general principles of the Rules. Document Production Requests under the Rules Pursuant to Art. 3.2 of the Rules, within the time ordered by the arbitral tribunal, the parties may submit to the arbitral tribunal and to the other parties a request to produce. Accordingly, there are certain elements that a request to produce shall contain. Firstly, the request shall provide a description sufficient to identify the relevant document, or a description of a narrow and specific category of documents that the requesting party reasonably believes to exist. Accordingly, as stated in the commentary of the Working Group on the IBA Rules, even if a party cannot identify the dates or the authors of the documents, it can, nevertheless, identify with some particularity the nature of the documents sought, and the general time frame in which they would have been prepared, so that the request may qualify as a narrow and specific category of docu- ments pursuant to Art. 3.3(a)(ii) of the Rules 2 . In practice, the parties may submit very broad document produc- tion requests. If these requests pertain to all correspondence exchanged, covering a very long period of time, these requests will generally not be granted 3 . 2 1999 IBAWorking Party & 2010 IBA Rules of Evidence Review Subcommittee, Commentary on the revised text of the 2010 IBARules on the Taking of Evidence in International Arbitration, p. 8. 3 Bernard Hanotiau , Massive Production of Documents and Demonstrative Ex- hibits, Written Evidence and Discovery in International Arbitration, Ed. Teresa Giovanini and Alexis Mourre, ICC Publication No. 698, 2009, p. 358.