As the reach of U.S. e-discovery law radiates across the globe, U.S. courts increasingly are being tasked with choice-of-law and cross-border e-discovery issues that arise when documents are sought in discovery from countries with very different legal systems. Enter U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin, presiding over Wultz v. Bank of China Limited,1 a high-profile international litigation that has required her to adjudicate the e-discovery obligations of a major Chinese bank. As with Zubulake v. UBS Warburg2 a decade ago, Scheindlin has the right case at the right time, and her decisions in Wultz may well chart the course of U.S. cross-border e-discovery law going forward.
Wultz is one of a number of litigations brought on behalf of an American family seeking discovery and damages in connection with a 2006 suicide bombing in Tel Aviv that killed a son and seriously injured the father. Lawyers for the Wultz family are seeking discovery and damages against entities around the world, and this ongoing case in the Southern District of New York offers a smorgasbord of U.S.-Chinese discovery issues for Judge Scheindlin, working with U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein.