Common and Civil Law Approaches to Documentary Evidence in International Arbitration

Submission of documentary evidence occupies a substantial part of international arbitration proceedings and efficiency of this procedure predetermines a success of arbitration. This matter gets quite complicated and challenging when an arbitration involves parties from different legal cultures. As a consequence, arbitral proceedings could take a long time and cause discontent among its users. Therefore, the analysis of ways and methods of raising the efficiency of the document submission is important for the effective international dispute resolution. The work examines arbitration rules of several arbitral institutions, law and practice of UK and the USA as the common law jurisdictions, which have different scope of document discovery. Then civil law jurisdictions like Germany, Uzbekistan are considered which do not practice common law type of document discovery, with a very limited scope. The paper also considers some hypothetical situations connected with the document production and evaluate its efficiency in international arbitration proceedings. It also observes common/civil law approaches that have shaped practices in the field. The views on how efficiency of this procedure can be raised are also analyzed, the IBA and Prague Rules are considered. It is argued that a certain degree of convergence in the documentary evidence practices is taking place in international arbitration, concluding with the forward-looking remarks.

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