Courts in the United States have increasingly allowed litigants to conduct non-party discovery of non-U.S. banks based on the banks’ operation of branches within the United States, reasoning that maintaining a branch here is sufficient to subject a foreign bank to general personal jurisdiction within the United States sufficient to compel compliance with U.S. discovery requests, including demands for documents located abroad and unrelated to the bank’s U.S. operations. However, the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Daimler AG v. Bauman,1 which clarified and significantly narrowed U.S. courts’ ability to assert general personal jurisdiction over foreign corporations, may significantly cabin this “branch-based” discovery trend.
Background
U.S. litigants often seek non-party discovery from foreign banks for information regarding bank clients (or non-clients about which the bank has information) that are parties to a lawsuit. In many cases, litigants do not limit their requests to information within the possession of the banks’ U.S. branches. Instead, they often demand that banks conduct searches of branches or offices outside the U.S. for information relevant to the underlying lawsuit, regardless of whether that information has any connection to the banks’ U.S. presence.
