July/August 2009 / Features
Strategic Management of E-Discovery in the Global Marketplace
As business has become more globalized, so has litigation. As a result, discovery frequently involves the exchange of documents created in multiple languages. For U.S. companies, this means it’s necessary to understand the legal complexities of collecting data from abroad and the “best practices for filtering, processing, reviewing and finally producing it.”
One complicating factor is the fact that privacy protections vary in different venues. They are more stringent in Europe, for example. Nonetheless, in one recent court case in the Eastern District of New York, a magistrate compelled a French bank to produce documents in a terrorism case.
“The analysis doesn’t end once documents are deemed discoverable,” the authors write. Issues that must then be addressed include the question of who will collect the data, under which rules, and how it will be filtered and converted to a uniform and usable format. Filtering and processing data in foreign languages is a formidable technical challenge, given the variety of grammars and language systems that exist world-wide. As a practical and budgetary matter, litigants must consider whether it’s worth paying for an initial review of documents by native speakers, and then whether the economies of machine translation outweigh the subtleties of translation that may be provided by a knowledgeable legal practitioner or specialist in some technical field.
