“Is this the document you want?”
The BankAmerica case consumed years and thousands of hours of our time. In fact, although the district court’s approval of the settlement was affirmed by the Eighth Circuit in 2004, we’re still working on the case. Jonathan Andres has devoted huge hours since 2004 to administering the settlement and dealing with the surprises that can pop up when you’re distributing half a billion dollars to over 100,000 class members.
A case this big, not surprisingly, can generate a lot of war stories. Here is one:
To appreciate this story, you have to remember that these events are taking place in 1999 and 2000, early in the days of computer-assisted litigation.
The defendants and other corporate witnesses had produced a massive amount of documents in discovery. Jonathan led a group of six to ten lawyers reviewing all of the documents for key documents. Eventually, they winnowed this down to about 10,000 key documents, some of which were hundreds of pages long.
How, however, were we going to be able to organize and use these key documents in deposition and motion practice and at trial?
Joe Jacobson believed he had the answer. As Jonathan and his team worked their way through the documents, Joe researched and had the firm buy a high-speed document scanner, along with a dedicated computer to run the scanner, and a laptop computer with optical character recognition (OCR) software and indexing software. As key documents were selected, a temporary assistant ran them through the scanner. Joe then copied the image files onto the laptop, converted them to PDF files, and ran the OCR software.
Because of the limits of the technology at the time, Joe had to carry the laptop computer with him everywhere he went. During the day, he would process small files on the laptop as he did other legal work on his primary computer. At night, he would start the largest files to process while he slept.
Joe got quite adept at knowing how long it would take to process a file and would frequently wake at odd hours to start the next file processing.
Ultimately all of the files were OCR’ed and an indexing program was run to create a master index of all of the documents. The documents and the index filled multiple CDs, and a set was given to every member of the plaintiffs’ team, including our expert witnesses, so that everyone working on the case had a full, instantly-searchable set of the key documents in the case. And this database was updated several times during the course of the case.
The database proved invaluable in the prosecution of the lawsuit.
One example of how useful it was to have this database occurred in a deposition taken in New York City by Jonathan. Jonathan had taken to bringing a portable inkjet printer with him everywhere he traveled during the BankAmerica case, and he had it with him at this deposition. The witness, a senior but not top level bank officer, claimed a lack of memory concerning certain key events important to the case. Jonathan pressed him for an answer, and the witness continued to claim he couldn’t remember. Jonathan asked if there was anything he could look at that might help him remember and the witness said that he might be helped by looking at documents. Jonathan asked if there was a particular document he had in mind, and the witness mentioned some very obscure report.
Jonathan then fired up the index and in less than a minute had found the document described by the witness.
He then pulled his portable printer and some paper out of his briefcase and in another minute had the document in the witness’s hand. The testimony started flowing and, funny thing, the witness did not need to look at any more documents to help him remember for the rest of the day.