SAVE THE DATE
November 2014 Asian Briefings
Drafts due by Aug. 15th
1 Practical Advice for Effective
eDiscovery in Japan
By Paul Starrett and Stephen S. Wu
8 Legal, Cultural, Technical and Logistical
Issues of Asian Electronic Discovery
By Paul Starrett and Stephen S. Wu
Practical Advice for Effective
eDiscovery in Japan
By Paul Starrett ( paul_starrett@ubicna.com), UBIC North America, Inc., and
Stephen S. Wu ( swu@ckwlaw.com), Cooke Kobrick & Wu LLP
With multinational companies spreading throughout the world, it is increasingly likely that foreign companies
will face litigation in US courts that
requires the gathering of evidence
abroad. With language differences,
cross-border discovery in support of
US litigation has always been difficult.
Adding to the complexity is the discovery of foreign-language electronically
stored information (ESI), particularly
information recorded in non-Ro-manized languages, such as Chinese,
Japanese and Korean. Companies
gathering evidence from businesses in
these countries face a host of technical,
procedural, business and even cultural
issues. Not much practical information
is available for corporate counsel in the
United States to navigate the thickets of
Asian eDiscovery.
A new book by Masahiro Morim-
oto, President and CEO of UBIC,
Inc., and Chairman and CEO of its
US subsidiary, UBIC North Ameri-
can, Inc., attempts to fill the void of
information about Japanese eDiscov-
ery. The book is entitled “eDiscovery
– Japan: A Pathway for U.S. Attorneys
to Do Business with Asian Corpora-
tions,” and was published by Global
Try in February 2014. The book
focuses in particular on gathering ESI
in Japan and the challenges associ-
ated with it. The primary audience is
US attorneys and law firms, and the
purpose of this article is to summa-
rize some of the key points made in
Morimoto’s book.
Challenges for eDiscovery in Japan
The most obvious challenge for gathering electronically stored information in
Japan is the fact that most ESI is likely
to be in Japanese. eDiscovery in Japan
is difficult in part because the process
of collecting and translating Japanese-language computer-based ESI is more
complex than copying and translating
Japanese text in paper form.
Asian
briefings
a special supplement to ACC Docket
graciously sponsored by UBIC, Inc.