Welcome

Welcome to this new, updated edition of our Guide.

Commerce today pays little heed to traditional geographic boundaries. Manufacturing, marketing, and distribution routinely crisscross the globe. The Internet has all but obliterated national and state borders. These realities -- and overlapping, diverging, or converging regulatory regimes -- have vastly increased the number and complexity of international litigations, arbitrations, and regulatory investigations or proceedings.

These realities present unique challenges - in our experience, specialized knowledge, skills, and strategies are required to manage, resolve, and avoid controversies affecting multiple jurisdictions. We published this Guide in 2007 to provide an essential reference to the practical navigation of these issues, emphasizing the concrete and strategic over the theoretical, the lore as well as the law, the unique opportunities presented by international matters as well as the challenges. The authors of this Guide, members of Proskauer’s multi-disciplinary International Practice Group, have helped shape the very law and practice in the areas discussed. They have drawn on their experience and knowledge to create a timely, up-to-date compendium of best practices and creative approaches to tackling new developments.

The enthusiastic reception the Guide has received tells us we have hit the mark.

In this edition, we have updated the Guide with recent developments and more Practice Tips. We also have added our 2008 Trends Report, which gives an overview of five of the most significant Trends in international practice for 2008. We will follow these Trends in future updates of the Guide. We also are adding links to related Client Alerts. This year, also look for new Chapters on International Competition Law, Intellectual Property, and an expanded discussion of ADR Beyond Arbitration.

As we said in 2007, for this project to meet your needs, it must be interactive.  We are grateful for the comments, questions, and suggestions that you have been sending.  Please continue to direct them to our authors, to our Editor, Jennifer R. Scullion, or to the Editor-in-Chief, Louis M. Solomon. We look forward to hearing from you.