Foreign Evidence Compulsion

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Cardinal_Richelieu_(Champaigne)
This guy ran France for about twenty years. All of his rules were Cardinal Rules.

CRITICAL to note at the outset:

  • You cannot simply serve a subpoena and expect it to work.  Whether it’s a U.S.D.C. subpoena to serve abroad, or a sister-state subpoena to serve in Missouri, mere service does nothing for you.
  • As of summer 2020, Viking Advocates has suspended work in evidence compulsion, but we can happily

…

You’ve served the complaint on all of your defendants, they’ve entered their appearances, and everybody is girded up for battle.  Discovery commences.  In one of your depositions, you learn that one of the defendants was somehow selling a knock-off of your client’s product through a German distributor, and you are convinced that somewhere in that…

You’ve served the complaint on all of your defendants, they’ve entered their appearances, and everybody is girded up for battle.  Discovery commences.  In one of your depositions, you learn that one of the defendants was somehow involved in a business arrangement with a French entity, and you are convinced that somewhere in that company’s vast…

It certainly wasn’t a slow weekend in global politics.  New Zealand’s exceedingly popular Prime Minister announced his retirement, Austria’s voters barely shunned a return to power by the hard right, and Italians rebuffed an arguably critical spate of constitutional reforms, prompting the resignation of their own popular PM.  So, what to make of these stories…

Door_Knocker
Image by Fancibaer, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Rule #1 in pursuing discovery in other countries:  stop calling it discovery.  It’s evidence taking or, in many instances, evidence compulsion.  Why?  Because foreign legal systems, especially those in the civil law tradition, take a dim view of American-style discovery.  When a U.S. litigator comes at them with a subpoena, walls get…

[Originally published at vikinglaw.us]

Of the three dozen or so Hague Conventions (specify which one you mean, counsel!), the United States is party to only a few.  Among the most productive and useful are the Service and Apostille Conventions.  And although it is helpful, the Hague Evidence Convention is not the great and wonderful…

Brexit

[Originally published at vikinglaw.us]

My newsfeed has been jam-packed with Brexit stories since England & Wales voted to quit the European Union (for the record, Scotland and Northern Ireland voted overwhelmingly to remain—and this will have additional effects on the state of the UK).  On the morning of the result, I gave a CLE…