In 2002 a Nigerian plaintiff (Esther Kiobel) filed a lawsuit against Shell at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. She wanted to obtain damages from Shell, by arguing that this company and Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary were complicit in a number of human rights infringements that had taken place in Nigeria. More than 10 years later, the US Supreme Court finally concluded that the US district courts have no jurisdiction over this type of cases on the basis of the Alien Tort Statute. Consequently, the US civil proceedings ended. Nonetheless, the plaintiff subsequently planned to file a similar lawsuit at the District Court of The Hague, because the defendant Shell is registered in the Netherlands. In light of these contemplated Dutch proceedings, Kiobel requested the US District Court for the Southern District of New York to order a US law firm (Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP (hereinafter: ‘Cravath’)) that had assisted Shell during the course of the abovementioned US civil proceedings to disclose the documents that had been shared between the parties on the basis of a provisional evidentiary measure. In doing so, Kiobel wanted to recover these documents, which she had to destroy or return to Shell following an earlier-imposed protective order aft er the Supreme Court’s judgment ended the case. Obviously, Kiobel then wanted to use these documents as evidence during the contemplated Dutch civil proceedings.