Originally from Electronic Disclosure in International Arbitration

The speed and convenience of electronic communications have, in the words of the author Thomas Friedman, flattened the business world...

The proverbial “back office” or “branch office” may now be situated thousands of miles from corporate headquarters. Technological advances often entail technology headaches. The need to preserve and produce electronic data for regulatory or litigation purposes from disparate countries and cultures and in different languages can induce a technology migraine. This article outlines the “condition” and offers suggestions for analgesic solutions.

Of course, business does not always “get done” – sometimes it goes wrong – and that leads to legal disputes or governmental investigatory proceedings. Those actions increasingly involve records spread about many countries, which must be identified, preserved, gathered, reviewed, and turned over to government agencies and corporate adversaries. And because nearly 99 percent of all documents created by businesses today exist in electronic form, disclosure requests in legal proceedings are often more concerned with seeking data than paper copies. And as the outsourcing of jobs has led to the creation of offshore databases and data warehouses, much of the data sought is not written in English or even familiar “Latin” character sets.

While the outsourcing of jobs and data has significantly decreased ordinary business costs, it has given rise to serious new legal, cultural, and technical challenges.