Sedona Conference on Cross-Border eDiscovery & Data Privacy
                 Barcelona, Spain June 2009

The Posse List has been fortunate to be able to cover the Sedona Conference on Cross-Border eDiscovery & Data Privacy which is being held this week in Barcelona, Spain.   As we have reported in the past, U.S.-style litigation and internal investigations and e-discovery are largely alien to non-U.S. organizations.   Data collection also is far more complicated in an international context than in a purely domestic one.   The purpose of this Conference is to have a meeting of the minds, a “meet and confer” if you will.

One of our Posse List (Europe) contacts is attending the meetings.   Representatives of the European Commission and data protection officials are in attendance and have spoken on many of the issues we outlined during our coverage of ILSL Conference (click here).   Extensive papers have been presented at the Conference including a long presentation on a key issue for those of us in e-discovery phase: pre-trial discovery for cross border civil litigation.

We cannot provide further details because of Conference restrictions, but we can provide three excellent resources:

1.  A great overview of the issue by Ken Rashbaum who is a Director of Fios Consulting at Fios, Inc. and a leading expert in the area (click here for the article).

2.  A very detailed article by Erica Davilla titled “International E-Discovery: Navigating the Maze” which covers all the points in great detail (click here).  

3.  The June issue of ACC Docket which has a great article titled “Protecting Privilege in a Global Environment“  (click here: the article in not publicly available but we will try to obtain permission from the ACC to reproduce a section of it).

4.   An article in the May 2009 issue of the  California Bar Journal by Michael Swarz titled “Beijing, Buenos Aires and Beyond: Litigating Global Electronic Discovery Considerations in a United States Courtroom” (click here).

Ken Rashbaum is a presenter at the Conference and we will be interviewing him in Barcelona.  We hope to post that interview next week.

Much of this affects Posse List members in the States who are working more and more on international discovery cases, as well as Posse List members in Europe and Asia where document reviews are on an upswing, all due to trends we discussed in the past: a continuing increase in FCPA cases, a continuing stream of patent litigation and cross-and other countries starting to enforce laws similar to the FCPA.   Much of this was confirmed earlier this week at the Association of Corporate Counsel Europe during its annual meeting in Europe (click here)  

And, as the SEC recently reminded, it has ”developed a sophisticated cooperative mechanism via bilateral and multilateral agreements with regulators around the world” for a global reach in securities enforcement (click here).