Electronic Disclosure In International Arbitration: The Issues - Panel Discussion - Chapter 8 - Electronic Disclosure in International Arbitration
About the Moderator:
LAWRENCE W. NEWMAN is a Partner in the Litigation Department of the New York office of Baker & McKenzie. He is the author and co-author of several works on international litigation and arbitration.
About the Panelists:
DAVID J. HOWELL is Co-Chair of the Global International Arbitration practice of Fulbright & Jaworski and acts as counsel and advocate in complex international arbitrations of commercial, investment and construction disputes. He has practiced in London, Dubai and Singapore and is a Fellow of the UK, Singapore and Hong Kong Institutes of Arbitrators.
TOM BARNETT of Alix & Partners was formerly Special Counsel at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP and is one of the pre-eminent thought leaders on the development of E-Discovery best practices. He was a co-author of the Sedona Conference Principles on Electronic Document Production. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Georgetown University Advanced E-Discovery Institute.
JUDGE RONALD J. HEDGES is Counsel at Nixon Peabody LLC and served as a United States Magistrate Judge in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey from 1986 to 2007. He is a member of the Advisory Board of The Sedona Conference as well as various Sedona Working Groups. Mr. Hedges is also on the Advisory Boards of the Georgetown University Law Center E-Discovery and Corporate Counsel Institutes.
STEPHEN JAGUSCH is a Partner at Allen & Overy LLP specializing in commercial and investment treaty arbitration. Mr. Jagusch has acted as adviser and advocate in dozens of ad hoc and institutional international arbitrations conducted in many countries across the world and also frequently sits as an arbitrator.
MICHAEL SCHNEIDER is a distinguished International Arbitrator and is a Partner in the Geneva based international law firm Lalive. He is a Vice-Chair of the ICC Arbitration Commission and the Leader of its Forum on Arbitration and New Fields. He was a member of the ICC Working Parties on the revision of the ICC Arbitration Rules, on Construction Arbitration and on the ICC Pre-Arbitral Referee Procedure. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Swiss Arbitration Association
(ASA).
Originally from Electronic Disclosure in International Arbitration
MR. HOWELL: Our program today is divided into four sessions. The first is an introductory session in which we lay out some of the issues. The second is a session principally of in-house counsel. The third session is the technical and IT experts. And the final session is where we address the way forward in terms of international arbitration practice.
New York is awash with arbitration lawyers for the 50th Anniversary of the New York Convention. It is an appropriate time to focus on the growing challenge of electronic disclosure in international arbitration.
The need to address electronic disclosure is driven by a number of factors; in the U.S. principally by litigation requirements. There is an also increasing need for companies to be prepared for regulatory investigations. From the perspective of counsel engaged in a dispute, the task of sifting through relevant documents is essential to analyze the case and advise the client on strengths and weaknesses. So there will have been a need to access and organize the relevant documents long before the issue of disclosure of electronic documents arises in arbitration.
Many parties to international arbitration now conduct substantially all of their business in electronic form, which gives rise to a wide variety of electronically stored information (ESI) stored in a large number of locations. The essence of the problem of e-disclosure is the sheer size and volume of electronic documentation. It is said that one terabyte (or one million megabytes) of text printed out would produce a pile of paper 85,000 feet high, almost three times the size of Mt. Everest! Of course, the terabytes and petabytes of electronic documents that many companies accumulate comprise multiples upon multiples of duplicates of backups, and backups of backups. But volume is an essential part of the problem of electronic disclosure.