Munger, Tolles & Olson litigation partner Jerry Roth, who is almost four months into his yearlong tenure as the president of the Paris-based legal, non-governmental organization Union Internationale des Avocats, is gearing up to host a summit in his home base of San Francisco next month on the growing international flavor of business disputes. The summit, titled "Cross-Border Litigation in the Digital Economy" will feature a day and half of panels starting March 12 focusing on the unique challenges that going international is raising for litigators and the in-house lawyers who hire and manage them.

In the run-up to next month's conference, The Recorder caught up with Roth to discuss the new issues raised by the globalization of litigation and the community of lawyers coming together to address them.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

The Recorder: Where did the idea for this particular summit come from?

Jerry Roth: So I do a lot of work in transnational litigation, and I work with a lot of in-house counsel who are often in charge of international matters. And I see them with a whole new set of issues that I think in-house counsel in the past did not have to deal with—different systems, different regulations, coordinating lawyers in the United States—their typical outside counsel—but also outside counsel in foreign countries. I just thought it would be a really great idea to get together to talk about issues coming from this rash of cross-border litigation and lawyers having to deal with it.

The tagline for the summit is 'How to Avoid Getting Lost in Translation.' What are the key issues that you and your colleagues are hoping to cover?

The literal meaning to that is just one part of the issue. There are often logistical issues related to language. More broadly, there are differences in the legal systems that sometimes look similar or might have similar-sounding concepts, especially if you're dealing with, for example, civil law countries. The world is divided up into common law and civil law and common law is by far the small minority—the U.S., the U.K,  Australia and India. Civil law systems dominate in Asia, Europe, South America and Africa.

I've often seen French lawyers getting a case from an in-house lawyer and basically have the attitude of "We'll let you know how this comes out." And things get filed, and things get written and things get said, and they're not used to working with the American in-house counsel who expects to review every single word that is said in court or is written in the briefs. So there are these cultural differences.

Just to give you another example, there is a special category of lawyers who practice before the Supreme Court in France. Those lawyers will not speak with a client. They would consider it a violation of their ethics. They will only speak with the lawyers who handled the case in the courts below. They believe the purity or the integrity of their arguments before the Supreme Court would be violated by dealing with client or an opposing party's counsel, much less a witness or somebody involved in the case. And that is so vastly different than what a U.S. lawyer expects and what a U.S. outside counsel is expecting.

So how are law firm lawyers feeling the pressures of internationalization differently than those who experience those pressures from in-house?

We often are co-counsel with counsel in the U.S. for a variety of reasons. Typically there's expertise or a preexisting relationship with the client. In the international context, it's a whole different ballgame. You are dependent on the foreign lawyers to help you navigate the foreign culture and the foreign legal issues, just as they're completely dependent on you to learn how they should be dealing with their U.S. client. So, the relationship is very different. You have to be a little more open to deferring to foreign counsel on certain issues, and you also need to know where you're not going to defer, where you have to push back and recall that this is a U.S. client with a U.S. legal issue that just happens to be playing out in a foreign country.

And so the whole calculus and the whole way of interfacing with a foreign counterpart is very different than dealing with co-counsel in the United States. Those are exactly the things we hope to talk about. What do you need to know? What do you need to talk about? What are the things to look out for and say?

Just to go back to that example I just gave: I understand that a Supreme Court lawyer in France may not speak with U.S. counsel, but I need a lawyer who can speak with that Supreme Court lawyer to tell us everything he or she is saying in argument. While I'll defer to you in the overarching point, you've got to defer to me on what my client needs to feel comfortable in this process.

How much of the conversation is going to center on the idea that sometimes making a winning argument in one venue can cause there to be a record that's problematic in another venue?

In each of the categories—employment, intellectual property, criminal law, data privacy, general standard litigation—it turns out that making a point or an argument in one jurisdiction can really be a problem in the other. I just had a matter where I represented a large Silicon Valley company in a matter in Greece. In the U.S. you would downplay the fact that this is a very big company for fear that it would seem that the company is trying to dominate this situation or it might have a negative impact on the jury. In the European context, the idea that this is a big, powerful company was their No. 1 argument. It was their first point because there the case is decided by a judge and not the jury and because Silicon Valley has a lot of cachet in Greece, the Greek lawyers were pushing for us to emphasize the size and power of our client in ways that we thought would be very unproductive and unhelpful in U.S. litigation. That's why it's important that you read everything that gets filed in a foreign case, because a smart lawyer on the other side may find and use against you something that's been said in foreign litigation. That's happening more and more.

Who is the target audience for the summit?

One is U.S. lawyers who do a lot of this international work and are having to interact with in-house lawyers. But we're also trying to attract in-house lawyers who are often the person assigned to international cases within a particular company. On each panel we will have at least one and in some cases two in-house actual lawyers at companies like Facebook and Intel and LinkedIn and Airbnb to share their experiences. And there is, in fact, a community. I know this because I've sort of been witnessing it.

These people in in-house departments who are tasked with global litigation, it's almost a whole new cultural group because they have different problems and different issues. They also often have been looking for the best counsel in a foreign country, so there's a big network among them in sharing information.

A third group that is coming is we have a lot of UIA members all throughout the world who are interested in the topic. We have 2,000 members in hundreds of countries and 300 bar association members.

Timing-wise, with international travel, has it been a bit tougher with the growing concerns about the coronavirus?

It has impacted our Asian participants who are not going to be attending. They're doing that because their own countries, especially China, are barring travel. We're barring travel. And they're choosing not to attend, because they don't want to put anybody at risk. We won't be having any Asian members, but I haven't seen any impact from members in other parts of the world.

Why does it make sense to have this event here in San Francisco?

One of my purposes as president of the UIA has been to showcase San Francisco as an international legal center. I actually think it has all of the ingredients to be one of the major international legal centers, but up until this point it has not lived up to that potential. We're just seeing things start changing. The recent law that allows out-of-state arbitration attorneys to practice in California in international arbitration without becoming a member of the bar or associating with a member of the California is giving rise to all kinds of interest. which is turning San Francisco and all of California into a major arbitration center. I think that's going to be a trend that we see over the next year.

Secondly, we have one of the best bars and best benches in the country. The quality of our bench and bar is second to none.

And thirdly, our client base is extraordinary. I see lawyers around the world whose eyes light up when I say I'm a lawyer from San Francisco because they immediately associate that with one of the great business centers of the world. All of them are anxious to hear from and to be associated with in any shape, way or form with a LinkedIn or a Facebook or an Airbnb or a Square or an Intel. And so given our client base, and given our lawyers and judges, and given that we're in one of the most desirable places to be in terms of proximity to Asia, in terms of proximity to South America, physical beauty, tourist accommodations, et cetera. And given our recent statutory change that has open up San Francisco and California to international arbitration, I am confident that we are on the verge of whole change for San Francisco to become an international legal center and we thought this fit right in with that trend.