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.