So far as I am aware, there is no competition to find the most regular participant in panels and webinars devoted to cross-border discovery and the comparative requirements of the US and UK. If there was such a contest, I would surely be a finalist, but the winner would almost certainly be US Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck.

A close runner-up would be former Senior Master Steven Whitaker who would have been the clear winner in a contest for “UK judges who know anything about the requirements of foreign jurisdictions”. That is partly because he was formerly responsible for dealing with applications to the UK for evidence under the Hague Convention, but is also because he took the trouble to study the comparative requirements.

The two of them came together to discuss global eDiscovery differences at the Exterro user conference in Portland, Oregon this week. LawTech News reported the session here and there is coverage from JD Supra here.

The key message, perhaps, is that the formal privacy and data protection requirements are not the only difference between the relative restrictions in the US and elsewhere – an equally fundamental difference lies in the effectively unconstrained demands of US discovery and the more restrictive requirements in the UK, where is necessary to specify which documents you want and show why they should be disclosed.

I understand that I was there by proxy, as it were, because another speaker quoted something I have written on the same theme.

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