I expressed puzzlement recently at the high proportion of page views from the US over a period when most of my focus has been on the UK draft practice direction. I know, of course, that there is much US interest in developments in other jurisdictions, particularly the UK, and there is an obvious connection between Judge Scheindlin’s Pension Committee Opinionwith its huge potential to drive litigation costs upwards, and the focus of the Jackson Report on Litigation Costs which is to drive them down.

It is more likely, in fact, that the recent US interest is based on two of my recent posts which concern the collision between US data demands and EU privacy restrictions. The two articles were Sedona Conference WG6 presentation to Article 29 Working Party in Brussels and The extent of the right to privacy in French employee’s e-mails. Both of these have been picked up by US commentators, and it is likely that the high proportion of US-derived page views come, in part at least, from these articles.

If the gist of my posts (and the comment on them) is that US lawyers are slow to identify, still less understand, the EU privacy problem, it is fair to say that that lack of understanding passes the other way as well (and I say that with full recognition that the EU’s Article 29 Data Protection Working Party is sincere in its wish to find a way through the problems). My original post about the Sedona Conference presentation had no higher ambition than to pass on the brief report from Sedona’s Jim Daley, and I now take the opportunity to expand on the central part of that. The main paragraph of Jim’s report reads as follows:

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