1st ICAI 2020

International Conference on Automotive Industry 2020

Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic

As a result of the potential court ordered disclosures, corporate documents and also, for example, the private communication of employees (electronic media including social media messaging) and other information are not private and secure in light of potential future collective proceedings. Implementation of the disclosure principle would dramatically alter the internal corporate policies especially in regard to confidentiality and information archiving. Global corporations with foreign litigation experience already adopted the appropriate policies and measures. For many local companies, however, the adaptation to the new legislative framework would not be easy. The change of corporate culture will likely involve new standards of confidentiality, documentation and information policies, rules of internal communication, rules of social media use and the like. The appropriate preventive measures in the above sense have to be assessed in the whole automotive industry upon the adoption of the ACP. 5. Conclusion The current ACP legislative activity was largely influenced by Dieselgate, affecting not only the national, but importantly also the EU legislative paradigm in general. The ongoing Dieselgate compensatory cases in the Czech Republic suffer from a principal lack of appropriate collective procedural instruments as the recent experience shows. The project of adoption of the ACP rules represents a late but realistic ambition to fill this gap. The legislation consideration, media and the public thinking reflecting the whole process was from the very beginning influenced by the negative experience of the unsuccessful quasi-group compensatory cases of the past. At the same time the qualified assessments leading to the reasonable legislative proposals have to filter the common prejudice toward the collective redress instruments caused largely by misinterpretation of the applicability of US litigation style and consequent hysteria of cultural imports. The current ACP combination of the representative action with the significant positions of an NGO with the collective action provides for a relatively wide range of instruments for the protection of consumers’ rights. The future efficacy of the rules, however, would largely depend on the judiciary. The ACP provides for the considerable discretion of judges, mainly in the principal assessments of certification, suitability of the case for the collective form of proceedings, evaluation of representation, amount and forms of disclosure, evaluation of evidence and especially the damages, including the court approval of all settlements. The impact of the collective action legislation to the automotive sector can be barely predicted in detail. In the overall assessment, however, the following factors have to be finally taken into the account: the safeguarding legislative measures, cultural differences in litigation limiting US-style litigation expectations, conservative tradition of Czech judicial decision-making and the other EU member states recent experience. In the above perspective, the non-revolutionary implementation can be reasonably expected with no reason for panic.

97