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The Growth of Litigation: A Global Trend

By ALM Staff | Law Journal Newsletters |
December 26, 2006

For the past three years, our law firm, Fulbright & Jaworski LLP, has conducted its Litigation Trends Survey, based on responses from senior-level in-house lawyers at companies in a variety of industries and at various revenue levels. In the first year, we surveyed only United States companies. Last year, we expanded our survey to encompass companies in the United Kingdom as well. This year's edition of the Litigation Trends Survey ' in recognition of the increasing globalization of the world economy and our own firm's rapid international expansion ' drew on responses from companies around the world. The survey results generally confirmed what prompted us to expand the scope of the Survey to begin with ' that companies are increasingly operating more globally and therefore face greater and more frequent challenges in protecting their interests in areas far from home.

The Survey

Our survey results this year showed that companies face increasing numbers of business disputes in jurisdictions on an international scale. Although U.S. companies report far fewer instances than their international counterparts of litigation arising out of events occurring abroad, more than a third of U.S. companies in the Survey have up to 20% of the matters on their litigation dockets pending in venues outside the United States. Over half of U.S. companies with revenues over a billion dollars reached that 20% threshold. U.S. respondents have told us that they face the largest number of lawsuits in North Asia (Japan and Korea), followed by South Asia, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the UK and Canada. Those companies predict that East Asia (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau) will be the foreign locale likely to generate the largest increases in litigation over the next three years. This anticipated increase likely is a reflection of that region's rapid economic growth and reputed laxity in certain areas of legal compliance (i.e., in the areas of intellectual property and financial services).

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