§ 172.032.Requirements for Arbitration Agreement

The writing requirement, defined for the way international commerce is conducted.

Three forms satisfy it.

A document signed by each party is the traditional one.

An exchange of letters, telexes, telegrams or other telecommunications counts, provided the means gives a record of the agreement.

The record is the requirement, not the medium. The listed technologies are examples, and what matters is that the exchange can be produced afterward.

The third form is unusual and useful. An exchange of statements of claim and defense in which one party alleges the existence of an agreement and the other does not deny it.

That makes a pleading exchange itself the writing. A respondent who defends on the merits without denying the arbitration agreement has supplied one.

Incorporation by reference is addressed separately. A contract reference to a document containing an arbitration clause is an arbitration agreement if the contract is in writing and the reference is sufficient to make that clause part of the contract.

Sufficiency is the test there, which is how standard-form terms and trade conditions come into an agreement.

Section 172.033 completes the picture by providing that an agreement includes any arbitration or conciliation rules it refers to.