During the last decade, lawyers faced with the novelty of electronic discovery have reacted in different ways. Some lawyers have mastered it, some have become reasonably conversant with it and some have just added it to the list of things they know they don’t know. However, there is an aspect of e-discovery that even the most experienced practitioners may not even know they don’t know: the complexities of e-discovery in the international setting. This article gives a brief overview of issues that can arise in connection with international e-discovery, in particular those relating to data protection regimes, the technical requirements for processing data from other countries and other issues that may arise in the collection and review process.
Many countries, most notably the countries of the European Union, have data-protection laws vastly different from those of the United States. EU countries were among the first to adopt data protection regimes, which then served as models for many other countries.
