By Jorge Schmidt, Legal Schmidt PLLC · Published June 28, 2026
Asset recovery often stalls at the same place: the money has moved through banks, and the foreign forum offers no real way to pry the records loose. Section 1782 is the tool that breaks the logjam. It lets a party in a foreign proceeding obtain discovery from a person found in the United States — and a string of recent decisions from the Southern District of New York shows how effectively it reaches bank records held by US institutions, including the US branches and agencies of foreign banks.
The nationality of the bank does not control; the location of the records does. In In re Application of AbbVie Logistics B.V., No. 1:26-mc-00284 (S.D.N.Y. June 23, 2026), the court granted an ex parte application authorizing Rule 45 subpoenas to Standard Chartered Bank, N.A. (New York Branch) and National Bank of Kuwait S.A.K.P. (New York Agency). Those are the US footholds of foreign banks, and that was enough: the statutory requirements were met and the discretionary Intel factors favored discovery. The practical lesson is to map every US-facing banking relationship in the chain, not just US-chartered banks.
Reaching a bank still requires personal jurisdiction. Section 1782's "resides or is found" language "extends to the limits of personal jurisdiction consistent with due process." A bank may be reachable where it is "at home" (general jurisdiction), but more often the hook is specific jurisdiction. In In re Golden Meditech Holdings Ltd., No. 1:24-mc-00024 (S.D.N.Y. Dec. 30, 2024), the court granted in part an application for discovery from several banks to trace allegedly misappropriated funds for use in a Hong Kong proceeding. Quoting the Second Circuit's In re del Valle Ruiz, it explained that specific jurisdiction attaches where the "discovery material sought proximately resulted from the respondent's forum contacts" — that is, where the bank's purposeful availment of the forum was "the primary or proximate reason that the evidence sought is available at all." Transactions routed through a New York branch are the paradigm. The work for counsel is to trace the flow of funds and show that the records exist because the money passed through the bank's US operations.
Courts screen these applications for fishing expeditions. Golden Meditech approved requests because they were limited to "logs or spreadsheets" and were "temporally limited" to a defined date range; on that record, the court found them not "plainly overbroad." A demand for entire account histories invites a motion to quash. Identify the accounts, the transaction types, and the time window tied to the alleged misconduct, and the order is far more likely to issue and to be honored.
Section 1782 is not limited to evidence for a pending trial. In In re Byrne, No. 1:23-mc-00048 (S.D.N.Y. May 2, 2023), a creditor sought bank records from New York institutions to enforce a Dubai fraud judgment and to support a contemplated criminal proceeding in Sharjah. The court held the "for use" requirement satisfied: discovery may be "for use" in enforcing an existing judgment and in a foreign proceeding that is within reasonable contemplation. For asset-recovery counsel, that means Section 1782 reaches post-judgment collection, not only the merits phase.
A frequent defense is customer confidentiality. It rarely works. In Byrne, the court allowed the judgment debtor to intervene to protect his interests, but it denied his motions to vacate and quash and refused to let him inspect the records the banks produced. Citing United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435 (1976), the court noted that "bank customers have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the financial records kept by their banks," and it found a substantial risk that, if shown the discovery, the debtor would "tip off" other liable parties to move assets. The case is a template: where there is a real flight-of-assets risk, ask the court to keep the records away from the very person you are pursuing.
Discovery obtained under Section 1782 is not locked to a single proceeding. Golden Meditech, citing the Second Circuit's In re Accent Delight Int'l Ltd., confirmed that an applicant may use the materials elsewhere unless the court orders otherwise — useful when the same money trail feeds enforcement actions in several countries. The targets are not without rights: as AbbVie noted (citing In re Sarrio, S.A.), the ultimate targets of a third-party subpoena have standing to challenge the court's power. But the typical ex parte grant is issued "without prejudice to the timely filing of a motion to quash" and "subject to reconsideration," with notice to the parties against whom the discovery is likely to be used — a structure that lets the applicant move quickly while preserving the target's chance to object.
It is worth dwelling on the jurisdictional point, because it is where these applications are won or lost. del Valle Ruiz supplies two routes. General jurisdiction reaches a bank only where it is "at home" — for a foreign bank, almost never the United States. So the workhorse is specific jurisdiction: the records are reachable when the bank's own forum contacts are the primary or proximate reason the evidence exists at all. The inquiry is causal, not merely a head-count of the bank's US offices.
In practice that means tying the discovery to the transactions the bank processed through its US operations. A wire that cleared through a New York branch, an account maintained at a US agency, a correspondent payment routed through the district — each is a forum contact that makes the resulting records fair game. A bank with no link to the transaction is not reachable just because it keeps a US office. The drafting implication follows directly: do not ask a bank for "all records" of a person; ask for the records of the specific transactions that touched its US operations. That framing both establishes jurisdiction and keeps the request narrow — the two things a court tests first.
A related question is whether to name the foreign proceeding. In AbbVie the order did not name it, yet the application was granted; identifying the foreign case is helpful but not always indispensable if the statutory showing is otherwise made. Even so, a clear account of the foreign matter strengthens the "for use" showing and blunts any argument that the application is a fishing expedition untethered to a real dispute.
Section 1782 turns the US banking system into a tracing engine for cross-border recovery. Map the money to a US bank contact — including the New York branch or agency of a foreign bank — and frame the jurisdiction around the transactions that put the records here. Keep the requests specific and time-bound. Expect to use the order for enforcement, not just the merits, and be ready to enforce it. Do not let privacy objections stall you, and where a debtor might warn confederates, ask the court to limit who sees the production. Finally, plan for reuse across parallel proceedings from the outset, while respecting any limits the court imposes.
Used well, Section 1782 is one of the most powerful asset-tracing and judgment-enforcement tools available to foreign counsel. For the full framework and strategy, see A Practical Guide to Bringing and Defending Section 1782 Applications.