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Founded in 2012, Signature Litigation has grown into one of London’s pre-eminent specialist dispute resolution practices. From the outset, we set out to do things differently: a conflict-free, disputes-only platform designed to give clients the undivided focus and strategic agility that complex, high-stakes matters demand.
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Established in 2017, Signature Litigation's Gibraltar office was founded to address growing demand for specialist expertise in commercial litigation and private wealth disputes on the Rock.
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Signature Litigation AARPI houses one of France’s most enviable product liability practices, with the team also handling commercial and corporate litigation, insurance and reinsurance, toxic tort and ESG, civil fraud and asset tracing, international arbitration, administrative and public law.
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Frankfurt has emerged as one of Europe's foremost financial and commercial centres and, increasingly, as a bridge between European and Asian markets. With that growth comes an increasing demand for sophisticated dispute resolution. Signature Litigation established its Frankfurt office to meet this need, bringing our conflict-free, disputes-only platform to the German market.
FIND OUT MOREPartner Thomas Rouhette and Associate Ela Barda comment in Global Data Review in relation to France's 1968 blocking statute. Thomas' and Ela's comments were published in Global Data Review, 13 May 2019, and can be found here. Signature Litigation Paris partner Thomas Rouhette highlights that by complying with foreign discovery orders, companies are “faced with the problem of potentially incurring criminal sanctions in the French system on the one hand, or possibly incurring a sort of court sanction in the common law jurisdiction on the other, should they decide not to provide the documents”.
Rouhette notes that court sanctions can come with severe commercial consequences. “That is why the statute has not been enforced for so long – because it is not possible to enforce it in practice without shutting down access to foreign markets for French businesses. The result is a vicious cycle – as a result, it was not enforced, and because of the lack of enforcement there is no confidence in the statute … and the threat of the blocking statute has not amounted to much in the US courts.”
Ela Barda, also of Signature Litigation in Paris, says improving the implementation of the Hague Convention – for example, by cutting the sluggish processing time for letters of request – could encourage foreign authorities to use it more to transfer information. A study on France’s response times between 2009 and 2013 suggests that France had a “slow pace of enforcement”, Barda says.
Barda also highlights that the Hague Convention contains alternative or simplified transfer methods. “A way to proceed could be by establishing practical guidelines for companies and foreign authorities,” she says.
“Foreign authorities should also be provided with more information on the effectiveness of the mechanisms provided for in the conventions – particularly the simplified procedures – through, for example, annual statistics on the effective use of the convention. We hope that these solutions, combined with the recent strengthening of the Sapin II Law, would help to convince US judges that, actually, there is no reason not to let the companies go through these mechanisms,” she says.
