United States

The US offers perhaps the world's widest variety of potential forums for litigating commercial disputes. Commercial disputes can be litigated both in the courts of each of the 50 states and in the parallel system of federal courts located in each state. Each state has a system of courts of general jurisdiction that have the power to adjudicate any commercial dispute that comes before them. The federal courts are preeminently courts of limited subject matter jurisdiction and are generally restricted to hearing certain types of cases. The US Constitution and state statutes require that a court, in addition to having subject matter jurisdiction over a given controversy, also have personal jurisdiction over the defendants in order to adjudicate claims against them. US courts have the ability to issue injunctions that either prohibit a party from taking certain action during the pendency of a lawsuit or require it to take some action while the lawsuit is pending. Conflicts between US discovery rules and more limited foreign evidence-gathering regimes are adjudicated on a case-by-case basis.