P2P

45 I L T A N E T . O R G W ith the trend of global businesses and transactions today, the number of cross- border cases is also increasing. It caused the high demand for multilingual support and document translations in e-discovery litigations, court reporting, and virtual data rooms. Thus, law firms and legal departments are hiring and partnering with reliable legal translators who promise a fast turn-around of projects. It is mentioned in Rule 34(a) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that the documents that will be presented in the court must be in a usable form. Thus, it is only natural for an English-speaking jury to require English translations of the Foreign Language Documents. Unlike before, the Federal Trade Commission is now refusing foreign documents without any accompaniment of English translations. Even if the documents that a company has been in different languages, they will no longer take the word of the party regarding its relevance to the case. They are adamant about every document translated into the language that the court of justice will understand. Challenges in multilingual litigations A lot of issues can arise from cross-border transactions and businesses due to the differences in the legal system of the parties. However, the difficulty in handling the cases doesn't end there. There are several factors to consider when doing foreign language litigation especially when it involves the corporate industry. Legal system The first one is the difference in the legal system. Just in different states, there could already be a difference in their rulings about how corporate laws work. What more in different countries? In total, there are five legal systems that every country is using today and a law firm must understand them when handling these corporate cases. It includes civil law, common law, customary law, religious and mixed legal systems. A large ratio of the world uses civil law such as South and Central America as well as the entire European countries. This system varies depending on the state or region implementing it which means that handling these cases needs a deeper understanding of specific law systems in the location. Next to civil law is a common law which is commonly used in the United States. In this system, the court tends to rely on the precedent judicial decisions rather than investigatory. Meanwhile, customary law is used in Asian countries where most of their laws are based on customs or patterns of behavior of its people. This is often affiliated in mixed legal systems with civil or common law in some regions. Lastly, the religious legal systems are those with laws emanating from religious texts and traditions. You will usually encounter this in many Islamic nations. Due to these differences in judicial systems, handling cross-borders can be extremely complicated starting from the e-discovery processes. It requires expertise and enough legal researches about the corporate cases of the clients. Distance and time difference Aside from that, the long-distance and time difference can also be an issue. Companies can have multiple extensions in different countries with representatives in each of them. In some cases, the court needs to contact them and even had a video call with them. For example, if the parties that will partake are from the US, France, and China, the time difference could be a large issue between them. Moreover, sending original documents from China to another country may take hours or days which adds to the difficulty of gathering pieces of evidence.

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