CISG case statistics: Who sues more often under CISG contracts, buyers or sellers?

In a first attempt of data mining, we were curious to see which party (or non-party) under a CISG contract is more commonly initiating a court or arbitration proceeding as the Claimant in CISG disputes.

Of the Claimants in our case database, 1,950 (or 59.9%) make up the category "Seller" (illustrated in blue in the pie chart). Among them, the large majority (94%) entered into the CISG contract as sellers, while 3% were a seller's successor, 1% its insolvency administrator and the rest parties otherwise connected to the seller.

In contrast, 1,237 (or 38%) of the Claimants were counted as "Buyer" (illustrated in red). Among those, again the large majority (94%) concluded a CISG contract as buyer, while 2% were a buyer's successors, 0,6% its insolvency administrators and the rest parties otherwise connected to the buyer.

Finally, "Third party" (71 Claimants or 2.1%, illustrated in orange) encompasses parties not sufficiently connected to either side, such as for example: Sub-buyers of the goods, owners of IP infringed by the goods or transportation companies. 

The dataset used was compiled on 5 October 2020.