Tom Webley, partner in London, Steve Cooper, partner in New York, and Ranna Musa, senior associate in Dubai, explore the issues and complexities of cross border disputes. In this introductory session, they discuss the issues around discovery, enforcement and privilege and the different approaches of the England & Wales, New York and UAE legal systems. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Welcome to Disputes in Perspective, a Reed Smith podcast. This podcast series will discuss disputes-related trends, hot topics, and developments occurring in the global legal landscape, and hopefully provide you with some helpful insights and practical tips. If you have any questions about any of the episodes, please feel free to contact our speakers.  Tom: Hello, and welcome back. This is another podcast in our Disputes in Perspective series. And today we're going to be looking at cross-border disputes, including a number of different jurisdictions. As you can all probably imagine, in a firm like Reed Smith, we've got 33 offices over a number of different countries, a sort of global footprint. So these are issues that we tend to see all of the time. It'll be unrealistic to get colleagues to join us from all offices, but we have managed to at least get a nice cross-section, I hope. My name's Tom Webley. I'm in the commercial disputes team in London. I'm delighted to be joined today by Ranna Musa, who's based in UAE, and Steve Cooper from New York. So two very different jurisdictions there. The scale of this topic is rather huge, to be honest. I mean, there's so many different issues that we see in litigation and arbitration involving a number of different jurisdictions, so we can't possibly cover them all in any detail today. What we're planning on doing in this podcast is more of an introduction, a sort of appetizer, if you like, just to flag some of the sort of issues which can arise, things that we see arising all of the time, with a view to then going into a much deeper dive into each of them in subsequent podcasts. So on that basis, I think to start off with, I mean, one issue that certainly tends to crop up quite a lot for us and something that we see which has international elements to it tends to be in relation to documentary discovery or disclosure. And Steve, as we've got you on the line with your U.S. perspective, I mean, I think it's fair to say that a lot of our clients over this side of the pond absolutely balk at the idea of getting involved in U.S. domestic litigation from the discovery point of view, the scale and the scope of it. But apart from that in relation to U.S.-specific disputes, do you ever see more international issues arising in relation to discovery? Yeah. Steve: Yes. Thanks, Tom. We see quite a bit of discovery from foreign disputes in the U.S., and there are a number of reasons for that. I mean, primarily, the U.S. is a notoriously wide-open, broad discovery forum. It permits a wide-ranging document discovery. It permits depositions, which is something that is not always available in other jurisdictions, that it is, of course, pre-trial testimony that is taken down by a court reporter. The whole thinking in the U.S. is to permit as much discovery as possible in order to avoid trials. Let each side know what the other side's information is, and hopefully. One, the case settles, or two, nobody is blindsided at trial. So as a result, we get a lot of requests in connection with foreign proceedings. Primarily, we see it in the 1782 context, that is 28 U.S.C. 1782, which is a very, very useful tool for foreign litigants that permits discovery in the U.S. in connection with foreign actions. We also see enforcement collection of judgment proceedings quite a bit because many defendants have assets in the US and also the discovery rules are quite favorable here when it comes to locating assets. And of course, we see a lot of issues involving the Hague Convention and the New York Convention on the Enforcement of