# eDiscovery in Germany Without Discovery: Where the Document Work Actually Comes From

_2026-09-29_

Germany has no discovery. Lawyers trained in the United States or Canada often hear that sentence and conclude that German disputes are light on documents, and that eDiscovery is therefore a niche concern in the market. That conclusion is wrong. The absence of a general discovery right changes how documents reach a case, not how many of them there are.

This post explains what the German Code of Civil Procedure (ZPO) actually provides, and then shows where German review volume really comes from. If you support German matters, or you are deciding whether to invest in review capacity there, the source of the work matters more than the label on the procedure.

## What sections 142 and 421 ZPO actually say

German civil procedure is built on the principle that each party presents the facts and evidence that support its own case. There is no obligation to hand the other side material that might help it, and courts do not allow requests that amount to a search for facts, often called Ausforschung.

Two provisions carry most of the weight. Section 421 ZPO covers a party who wants to prove a point with a document held by the opponent. That party must apply for an order to produce it, and under section 424 ZPO the application has to identify the document and its content with some precision and explain why the opponent holds it. A category of documents is not enough.

Section 142 ZPO is different in kind. It allows the court, on its own initiative, to order a party or a third party to produce documents in its possession that a party has referred to. Third parties can resist where production is unreasonable or where they hold a right to refuse testimony. The court has discretion, and it does not use section 142 to relieve a party of its duty to substantiate its own claim.

Read together, these provisions permit targeted production. They do not permit broad requests. For a document team, this means that a German proceeding rarely produces a large review population by itself.

## Where the volume actually lives

The volume lives around the proceeding rather than inside it. Four situations account for most of the document work that reaches German teams.

Internal investigations come first. A company facing an allegation of misconduct, fraud or compliance failure reviews its own mailboxes, chat records and file shares to establish the facts before deciding what to do. No court orders this review. The company does it because it needs answers and because its management has duties to act on what it finds.

Cartel proceedings come second. Regulatory investigations involve large volumes of internal communication, and follow-on damages claims add a further layer. Section 33g of the German Act against Restraints of Competition (GWB) gives claimants a statutory right to disclosure of evidence in damages claims, which creates a route to documents that ordinary civil procedure does not.

Responses to United States discovery come third. German subsidiaries and German employees regularly hold documents that a United States court has ordered a party to produce. The review work happens in Germany, under German data protection law, for a foreign process. We covered the tension in our post on [Article 48 GDPR and the US discovery request](https://www.claira.to/stories/article-48-gdpr-and-the-us-discovery-request) and will not repeat it here.

Arbitration comes fourth. Parties in international arbitrations seated in Germany or involving German companies commonly agree procedures based on the IBA Rules on the Taking of Evidence, which allow requests for defined categories of documents. That is a document production process in everything but name.

None of these four depends on a court order under the ZPO. All of them involve real volume, real deadlines and real cost.

## What this means for review teams

If the work is driven by investigations, regulators and foreign proceedings, then the teams doing it face pressures that differ from a domestic litigation model. Timelines are set by an investigation or a regulator, not by a court calendar. Populations are often mixed-language, with German and English documents sitting in the same custodian mailbox. Personal data is present in almost every collection, and works council considerations often apply.

Those conditions favour a review approach that can read the whole population quickly, in more than one language, and record why each call was made. A linear human read across a large mailbox collection is slow and expensive, and it produces inconsistent results across a team.

This is the setting where AI-assisted first pass review earns its place. A reviewer writes a criterion in plain language, tests it on individual documents until it behaves, and then applies it across the full set. Claira does this inside Nuix Discover through Bulk Scan, which applies one prompt across many documents and writes each result into a field the team already uses. The [Bulk Scan documentation](https://support.claira.to/docs/en/ai-review/bulk-scan) describes how a prompt moves from testing on a single document to running at scale.

Because each result carries the reasoning behind it, the output can be checked and defended. That matters in an investigation, where a finding may later be examined by a regulator, a works council or opposing counsel.

## Where the data is processed

German teams will ask where their documents go before they ask what the tool can do. That is the right order of questions. Claira is available with a dedicated German deployment region, so document content stays in Germany during review. We described the design in our announcement of [in-country data residency for Germany and Europe](https://www.claira.to/stories/claira-now-available-germany-in-country-data-residency), and it is the reason a German investigation team can run an AI first pass without opening a transfer question.

## Where to start

Start by mapping your own work to the four sources above. If most of your German volume comes from internal investigations, the priority is speed to first findings and a clear record of method. If it comes from US discovery responses, the priority is minimisation before anything leaves the country. If it comes from cartel or arbitration work, the priority is disciplined handling of defined categories.

In every case, the useful question is not whether Germany has discovery. It is where your documents come from, how many there are, and how quickly your team can find the ones that matter. If you want to see how that looks on a German collection, you can [book a short session with our team](https://www.claira.to/meet).