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