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During the course of prosecuting a litigation many procedural and evidentiary documents are disclosed to the court and the other parties. These may be disclosed informally with covering correspondence, formally in court filings as attachments to documents such as affidavits, pleadings, or as part of the production of documents for trial, etc. Keeping track of all these disclosures is important for various reasons and so in this article we'll cover how MasterFile lets you record and track pleadings and disclosures.
Here's what we'll cover:
What exactly do we mean by pleadings and disclosures
When designing this aspect of MasterFile, we discovered that there wasn't a precise definition of what exactly is a pleading. The general consensus was that pleadings arise from, or are, procedural documents that have been filed with the Court.
However, since pleadings are just documents, the term "Pleadings" was often used as a document type, in the same way correspondence, expert reports, etc., are document types. This leads to a confusing situation as it would appear a document's type changes from say a "Notice of Motion" during its draft stage to a "Pleading" after it has been filed. Furthermore, one regularly asked to see all the "Pleadings" for a particular motion or application, again suggesting "Pleadings" are a type of document. Therefore there was the temptation to change document types from whatever they were before being filed to "Pleadings" after being filed. Often this is done by creating a "Pleadings" subdirectory and copying or moving the documents into it. This approach to handling pleading documents is inherently problematic, and the problems quickly get out of hand as documents get reused in further motions or applications or are used as "evidence" in one situation while in support of a "pleading" in another situation.
In reality, however, document types don't change. For example, a revealing letter may become "evidence" when used in Court, but it's document type remains a letter nonetheless. Similarly a Notice or Subpoena may be referred to as pleadings after they have been filed or served, but they are still Notices or Subpoenas. And in fact when you need a specific document, you'll look for the "Notice of Motion" for the such and such issue, for example.
The solution to dealing with pleadings is realizing that pleadings are not a document type but the word is simply a term used to collectively describe documents that have been used for a specific purpose; just as the term "evidence" is used to collectively describe letters, e-mail, expert reports, used at trial.
Therefore, in dealing with pleadings, first it must be decided that a document type doesn't change because it is used for different purposes. And second, when a document is used formally in support of one or more court applications (whether as evidence, for procedural matters, etc.), we need to record each of these events. In this way, each document can be reviewed to see when and for what purpose it has been used and also all documents used for a particular purpose, such as a hearing, can also be gathered and reviewed as a collection. In this way the documents can still be found by type, but also by when and for what purpose they were used -- making duplicate copies of documents are not needed, changing a documents type is not done, nor other similar "band-aid" solutions.
This is the approach MasterFile uses and next we'll explain how it accomplishes it.
Recording disclosures -- by individual, by hearing or by document production
In MasterFile we refer to a use of a document as a "disclosure", as in essence that is what is being done to the document -- it is being disclosed for some purpose. MasterFile distinguishes between three types of disclosures:
- Formal -- disclosures made to the Court or as part of Court proceedings; that is filings made in support of a motion or application, perhaps as attachments to an affidavit.
- Production -- evidence disclosed to be used at trial; these documents will usually be Bates number stamped sequentially through the whole set.
- Informal -- disclosures made to parties other than the Court. For these MasterFile lets you record the party to whom it was disclosed, for reference purposes. Informal disclosures can also be made of extracts and facts, so for example, if you decided it was necessary to reveal critical parts of a document or some points about a fact, you can record that these were disclosed too. You'll probably only want to use the informal disclosure when you're disclosing lots of documents to other parties, outside of formal Court proceedings and want to record who was sent what.
The three types of disclosures are recorded in the "Disclosures" subsection, shown below, under "Additional Information" in the document profile:
As can be seen, this expert report has been disclosed:
- informally to two staff members at Sky High Elevators,
- was used in a hearing on 6th July, 2003 to force the the other side to release their internal test reports, and
- was produced as Exhibit 383 (pages 5501 to 5503) of one document production set and as Exhibit 1001 (pages AA8801 to AA8803) of another.
Informal and hearing disclosure details can be set or reset for documents individually as needed, or rapidly, in bulk, using MasterFile's global maintenance utilities.
Production history information can be recorded several ways:
- If you use the Evidence Cruncher and MasterFile briefcases to produce your documents, the production history is automatically updated from the briefcase.
- When you load documents previously disclosed, existing Bates production history can be loaded at the same time with Express Load's CSV mode.
- If documents have had additional production history, due to disclosure by another party for example, this history can be appended to existing history with Express Load's CSV mode.
Finding what's been disclosed to whom -- the disclosure and production views
 To find out what documents have been disclosed for which hearing, trial, document production set, etc. you just have to open the relevant disclosure view from the menu panel as shown at right.
Below, examples of these views are shown and explained.
The "by Hearing" view shown above, lists all documents formally disclosed for a particular motion, in chronological order. Notice how MasterFile's Extract Repository is also active so you're able to quickly see the critical information culled from Steven Dhoerty's Examination for Discovery transcript.
The "by Hearing, Doc Type" view shown above, lists the same documents, however they are categorized by document type so you're able to find specific documents instantly rather having to review the entire "by Date" list to locate them. Note that documents which normally appear under MasterFile's "Court Documents" category get placed under the "Pleadings" category here, since they have been used formally as part of a court proceeding. Only "Court Documents" appear as pleadings -- that is the definition of "Pleadings" we use in MasterFile.
The "Everything disclosed" view lists all documents disclosed formally, informally or as part of a document production, under their respective categories, categorized by document type.
Most document views show a column with their most recent Bates numbers, as the "by Doc Type" view shown above. The views can be resorted by Bates numbers by simply clicking the column title. The highlighted meeting minutes document is also highlighted below in the "Production history" view shown below.
The "Production history" view lets you view all documents by production set. It lists each document within a production set by Exhibit and corresponding Bates page number. Shown above are the three documents disclosed in the production July 14th, 2005. An additional production was also created on May 4th, 2005.
Further information
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