Tyco Trial Shows Benefits, And Limits, Of Technology
By John Bringardner – Law Technology News
Published: 2005
EXCERPT: In the rapidly expanding boys club of corporate criminals, L. Dennis Kozlowski stands head and shoulders above his peers. The former chief executive officer of Tyco International Inc. became easy fodder for the tabloids with stories of his $6,000 shower curtain and the $2.1 million birthday party he threw for his wife on the island of Sardinia. Kozlowski and chief financial officer Mark Swartz allegedly stole more than $150 million by giving themselves enormous bonuses and misusing company loan programs. Prosecutors claimed the pair pocketed another $405 million by inflating the company's stock price. Their trial (New York v. Kozlowski and Swartz, 2002 Cr. 5259, State Supreme Court, New York County) lasted six months, including 12 days of jury deliberation, before ending in a mistrial. A second trial, lasting five months, began on Jan. 18, 2005. Kozlowski's team of six attorneys from Bryan Cave, lead by New York City solo practitioner Stephen Kaufman, used a sophisticated, high-tech arsenal to defend against the Manhattan district attorney's office, led by assistant DA John Moscow in the first trial, and Assistant DA Owen Heimer in the second. Five lawyers from Stillman & Friedman represented Mark Swartz. The prosecution's case hinged on whether company documents -- mostly from computer hard drives, including contracts, spreadsheets and e-mail -- could prove that Kozlowski and Swartz had authorization for their finances. "I think at the end of the day we went through 10 million pages," said Matthew Browndorf, a Bryan Cave associate who served as lead technologist for the Kozlowski team. The defense was overwhelmed with data from Tyco, he recalls. "We received multiple hard drives -- in the beginning at least 200 -- hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes and we had no idea what it was." Processing and reviewing the electronic data, then making sense of it, was a huge task. All hard-copy documents and electronic data had some form of coding done to them. A team of coders handled the hard copies while the electronic data was sorted automatically, stripped of metadata and converted into .tiff format. San Francisco's CaseCentral did a majority of that work for the Kozlowski team, with the rest handled by Gilbert, Az.-based inData Corp. and White Plains, N.Y.'s DocuServe. DocuServe provides transcription services to Law Technology News magazine. CaseCentral created a secure online repository for Bryan Cave, to facilitate review from remote offices. This also gave the attorneys access to the entire database from within the courtroom without having to haul the actual hard drives with them. A permission system allowed a central administrator to restrict an individual's access to a single document or database without worrying about revealing privileged material, explained Browndorf.
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