Compulsory conciliation covers the smallest claims and becomes optional above them, while the average claim before the DIFC Court of First Instance has more than doubled to AED 112.6 million.
The Dubai International Financial Centre Courts registered 810 cases in the first half of 2026, a quarter more than a year earlier, carrying a combined value of AED 10.02 billion. That is 48 percent higher than the same period in 2025 and works out at roughly AED 55 million in new claims for every day of the period. The figure that matters most sits inside the release: the main Court of First Instance division recorded 72 claims, with the average claim more than doubling year on year to AED 112.6 million.
The UAE operates a compulsory settlement system designed to stop disputes before they reach that stage. It is calibrated for disputes an order of magnitude smaller.
Where the gate sits
Under Federal Decree-Law No. 40 of 2023, in force since 29 December 2023, a Mediation and Conciliation Centre is obligatorily competent to conciliate civil and commercial disputes whose value does not exceed AED 5 million, and disputes between spouses or relatives up to the fourth degree regardless of value. Above AED 5 million, litigants may agree to use the Centre, whether before filing or during proceedings. They are not obliged to.
In Dubai the threshold is lower again. Decision No. 4 of 2025, issued by the President of Dubai Courts and published on 26 March 2025, gives the Centre for Amicable Settlement of Disputes exclusive jurisdiction over claims below AED 500,000, alongside the division of jointly owned property and the approval of settlement agreements regardless of value.
The direction of travel is toward hardening the mechanism, not widening it. Dubai’s Law No. 9 of 2025, effective 17 July 2025, replaced ten articles of the emirate’s conciliation law and explicitly prohibited the courts from registering any claim subject to mandatory conciliation unless it has first been presented to the Centre, the Family Reconciliation and Guidance Committee, a relevant government agency or an authorised conciliator. Settlement agreements certified by an authorised conciliator now bind without judicial approval and can be challenged only for fraud or deception, within five days.
Where it applies, it delivers. The UAE Government’s official portal records a settlement rate of 61.3 percent for civil and commercial disputes handled through alternative dispute resolution in 2022, and the Ministry of Justice now operates Wasata, an electronic mediation platform covering both judicial and non-judicial referrals.
The proposal
Sarah Malik, a UK-qualified barrister of more than 25 years and founder of the ADGM-registered dispute resolution boutique SOL International, would move the gate. Asked what single law she would introduce in the UAE, she names a mandatory early dispute risk disclosure and settlement conference: full document disclosure before positions harden, identification of the actual commercial issues, and a structured meeting attended by people with authority to settle.
Her argument is about accounting rather than procedure. “People think damage comes from losing a case. It doesn’t. The damage comes much, much earlier,” she says, listing frozen relationships, management distraction, reputational leakage, cash flow pressure and years of strategic paralysis. “Unresolved disputes are not just legal events. They contaminate your business, they infect hiring decisions, lending, partnerships, investor confidence and the mental health of those involved.”
The jurisdiction she trained in has already moved. In Churchill v Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council, handed down on 29 November 2023, the Court of Appeal held that the English courts do have the power to order parties into mediation or another non-court process and to stay proceedings for it, overturning what had been treated for nearly two decades as a prohibition. The Civil Procedure Rules were amended on 1 October 2024 so that dealing with a case justly and at proportionate cost expressly includes promoting or using alternative dispute resolution, with the costs discretion extended to cover a party that unreasonably fails to participate.
Practitioners diagnose the same problem. The 2025 Queen Mary University of London and White & Case International Arbitration Survey, drawing on more than 2,400 responses, found 49 percent of respondents supporting early determination and 50 percent supporting expedited procedures, with the most common complaints being overly adversarial conduct by counsel, lack of proactive case management and over-lawyering through voluminous submissions and excessive document requests.
The counterweight
Compulsion is not free. Early disclosure handed to a well-resourced opponent is intelligence as much as transparency, and a settlement conference attended without intent becomes a scheduled cost rather than a saved one. The Court of Appeal in Churchill deliberately declined to lay down fixed principles on when such an order should be made, which leaves the hard question with individual judges rather than answering it.
That is an argument about design. It is not an argument for the current line. The UAE has already accepted that the state may compel parties to sit down before they litigate. What remains open is the number, and the number currently stops well below where the damage starts.
