linguistic:paraphrasing, linguistic:translation
Europe

Traditionally, European courts have provided no discovery or rather minimal discovery (by American standards). Where available, European discovery is rarely self-executing (that is, automatically effective by operation of law), meaning that the defendant and third parties have no obligation to disclose anything unless and until the plaintiff obtains a court order. Civil law countries strongly dislike and oppose the American principle of broad discovery in civil litigation. For example, since 1968, it has been a crime for a French company to produce commercial information in foreign legal proceedings without express authorization from a French court, and in turn, this has been raised as a defense to discovery by French defendants in American product liability cases. Since the defendant usually possesses most of the extant evidence of a product defect, in most European countries it is "very difficult, if not impossible, for a victim or her lawyer to investigate a product liability case."