Peter Bert's Blog about Litigation, Arbitration and Mediation in Germany – Art Law, Case Law, News etc.
Ted Folkman of Letters Blogatory has a “major conceptual change” to the rules on discovery in the United States to report:
European readers, who love to hate U.S. pretrial discovery—this one is for you. Absent action by Congress, on December 1, 2015, an amendment to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) 26 adopted by the Supreme Court will go into effect. The main change concerns the scope of permissible pretrial discovery. Read More
Today’s guest post is a slightly amended version of a post published at Letters Blogatory last week. Ted Folkmann discusses In re application of Kreke Immobilien, a case from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. A German party was seeking discovery under Sec. 1782 U.S.C. in support of German proceedings. Sec. 1782 has become an increasingly popular tool (see here for an earlier post on the topic) for German litigants to overcome the inherent limitations of German civil procedure to obtain documents from the opponent, or from third parties. But let’s now hear from Ted: Read More
US discovery is a bone of contention between Germany and the United States. If you run a search for Justizkonflikt in a German legal data base, you will find hundreds of entries dealing with conflicts between the US and the German judicial systems – going back to Peter Schlosser’s 1985 publication which, if it not coined the phrase Justizkonflikt, certainly popularized it. If you look closer, you will find German authors and courts almost exclusively thinking about ways and means to protect German parties against US style discovery or US punitive damages awards. The fact that, on the other hand, US law is quite liberal in making US discovery available in support of foreign proceedings under 28 USC Sec. 1782 became more widely known only in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s 2004 decision in Intel Corp. v. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Read More