How I became a database junkie

In 1987 my friend Danny Evans, a lawyer in Birmingham, Alabama, asked if I was interested in being co-counsel with him in a case he was preparing to file in rural Alabama. The facts were compelling and the stakes were enormous. Of course I was interested.

Our clients were the adopted daughters of a very wealthy but incompetent man (the father) who in approximately 1955 married a much younger woman. It seemed that after the marriage, the new wife’s son began managing his step-father’s affairs. Under the son’s management, and according to our information, with the assistance of an attorney, accountant and financial adviser, the step-son had prospered financially at the expense of the father. Most of the transactions were accomplished through a durable power of attorney issued by the father in favor of his step-son. The matters came to a head when, to the surprise of everyone, the second wife died. Upon her death, the daughters advised the step-son that they were going to assume responsibility for taking care of their father. The step-son refused to cooperate. There was no alternative other than filing suit. The legal issues involved breach of fiduciary duty, undue influence and tracing of assets.

Naturally, the first formal discovery we undertook was to serve a request for production of documents on each of the defendants. That included the step-son, the accountant, the lawyer, the law firm and the financial adviser. After some skirmishing, mountains of documents were available for us to review and copy. Remember, this was 1987 and copy capabilities were a far cry from where they are today. We were the proverbial dog that caught the car.

Around this time, my wife Renea was ready to quit her job at Medical Genetics. Part of her duties there involved working with “D-Base” assimilating medical records on children with a rare condition called SP. Danny and I talked to Renea and she thought she could write a program in “D-Base” to accomplish our goals. Danny and I were in front of the technology curve; but this was 1987 and we weren’t that far in front of the curve.

Using “D-Base” and reading what little relevant information we could find about designing a law specific database, Renea wrote a program that allowed for the clerical entry of the beginning and ending bates stamp number of each document; the documents date and type; the amount if applicable (for instance if it was a check); and what turned out to be the most important fields for this case, the author, recipient and the identity of all producing parties.

Once we finally got the documents copied we stored them at Danny’s office in Birmingham. Renea wrote the database in Mobile. Danny bought a 386 Computer (state of the art at the time) with what then thought to be a large hard drive (probably 10 meg or so). My recollection is that computer cost $30,000. We hired two employees who worked exclusively on entering bibliographic information about the documents in that database.

Around the time all of the documents had been entered in the database, the law firm, accountant and business adviser who for reasons not clearly apparent to me, dubbed themselves the “Professional Defendants” filed a motion for a more definite statement. They argued to the trial judge that they were professional members of the community and that their reputations were damaged by having a law suit pending against them. They said that the allegations of the complaint were too general and that the daughters should be required to provide detailed information about what the daughters’ contend each Professional Defendant did wrong. This was a serious motion and the Court agreed that the case had been pending long enough that it was time for the plaintiffs to “put up or shut up” with regard to the professional defendants. We had thirty days to provide specific details outlining what we contended that each defendant did and when.

It was now time to implement the database. Before doing so, the work that had been done by the clerks had to be merged. The software did not have an append function, consequently, the procedure was to “clone the database,” delete it and put what was essentially two separate databases into one. This was a first for Renea and, given the stakes, was highly stressful for her.

With the databases merged and having had the final product “beamed” (code for e-mailed) back to us in Mobile, we were eager to learn what kind of a return we were going to get on our investment of time and money. This was new territory – particularly for Danny and me. Danny and I are both inclined towards suspicion – him more than me – particularly as to the extent of production provided by the other side. Consequently, we agreed that our very first search would be to ask the database to identify each document that a defendant authored or received but did not produce. Our thinking was that we would probably be most interested in the documents that the defendants culled. We were right and we hit a gold mine.

The first search of one defendant produced perhaps 150 documents. Roughly 30% of the documents were inconsequential and had not been produced because undoubtedly they had not been retained. It was the other 70% that produced howls of delight. I remember holding documents and shaking them and asking, rhetorically, “I wonder why they didn’t want to produce this”. We ran the same search as to each of the other defendants.

Our next step was to quickly go through and code each document that was not clearly trivial as “hot.” Our rationale was that we would best be able to evaluate the documents when we arranged all of the remotely significant documents in dated order. We initially coded approximately 500 documents – out of tens of thousands – as “hot.” We arranged those documents in dated order. There has been a minimum of legal time invested at this point.

A careful review of the “hot” documents gave us a chronology of the major events and a deeper understanding of the case beyond what was evident from the documents. For instance, there was a flurry of activity in early November of one year. The reason for the activity was not apparent initially. With our curiosity we made further inquiries and learned that the father was ill and had been admitted to the hospital. We surmised that the defendants were engaged in some highly suspicious inter vivos estate planning.

Another revealing search we did was for any check from any of the father’s accounts in the amount of $200.00 or higher and written to any of the defendants. Individually, some of the larger checks lead us to additional evidence. Collectively, the checks demonstrated the extent of the financial benefit each of the defendants received as a consequence of “assisting” our clients’ father.

Every time we identified a significant document we coded it as “hot”. Within the thirty days allowed by the Court, we were able to chronicle the objectionable activity of each defendant by day, month, and year. We pointed out the specific transactions and the extent to which each defendant was involved. Preparing the response was the easiest part of the process. We simply ran a search for “hot documents” sorted by date with the document type and participants identified. That search was downloaded as a text file and edited in Word Perfect. Very shortly after we provided a more definite statement the defendants initiated settlement discussions. The case was very favorably resolved shortly thereafter.

We’ve Come a Long Way Baby

Since 1987, information management has come a mighty long way. Our firm now uses Summation as our primary litigation support program. With the new rules of discovery which allow production of documents in native format going from receipt of documents to having a searchable produce has been greatly simplified. Software designed for the legal community allows relatively unsophisticated users to easily replicate the searches we performed in 1987. When documents, as opposed to electronically stored information are produced in discovery, they can be inexpensively scanned, ocr’ed and loaded in a database. Both clerical and legal time are reduced resulting in both higher profit to the law firm and lower costs to the client.