I recently gave a CLE presentation at the LegalTech West Coast Conference in Los Angeles on the legal problems and tensions of conducting U.S. civil litigation ediscovery in the European Economic Area (EEA), which consists of the 27 EU member states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.
The subtitle “Clash of the Titans” derives from the fact that on the one hand the U.S. has the broadest pre-trial civil litigation discovery procedure on earth, while on the other hand the EU has the most stringent data protection framework on the planet. Trying to collect and transfer terabytes of data, most of which contain personal components, in the EU, where data protection is a fundamental right and very heavily regulated, is indeed quite a challenge.
In this presentation, I analyzed the U.S. jurisprudence on the extra-territorial application of U.S. ediscovery obligations as well as the EU guidelines concerning personal data collected while conducting U.S. civil ediscovery in the EEA. I introduced the mostly American audience to principles of EU data protection.
Here is the slide deck I used for this presentation.
Legaltech West Coast: Cross Border Ediscovery vs. EU Data Protection
Earlier this year, I organized and moderated three panels on Ediscovery at the CPDP Conference in Brussels, where I introduced the unique U.S. civil ediscovery framework to the mostly European audience.
Here is the video of the cross-border ediscovery panel I moderated.
Thanks to my dual qualification as an attorney in the U.S., as well as in the EU, I am in a unique position to act as a bridge between the exclusively common law tradition of pre-trial ediscovery in civil litigation in the U.S. and the EU tradition of data protection of personal data.
