As corporate America increases its investments in China, it must learn to pay increased attention to the country’s unique sensitivities around a combination of data-privacy, state-secrecy and accounting laws. These laws present a daunting challenge, as U.S.-based attorneys find themselves working on cases in which the data are strictly regulated by Chinese authorities, may be written in a different language and reside on multiple and complex systems. A breach of data-privacy regulations in many jurisdictions can lead to sanctions; a breach of China’s state-secrecy laws can potentially be much more severe.
The days of collecting data in China and sending them back to the United States for hosting and review are long gone. Here are some common data-collection scenarios and the best practices for attorneys facing these types of electronic-discovery challenges in China.
