They’ll take you through all the grim details.
“Litigation support is Brill’s responsibility, and it’s just a fancy name for sending documents to people. As you probably know, there are a bunch of criminal proceedings underway against former MWB employees, and more are coming. On top of that, a slew of civil actions are gearing up. That means that every day, day in and day out, the MWB liquidation committee gets requests—orders, really—to produce documents. Task force investigators, the U.S. attorney, defense counsel, civil plaintiffs, you name it—they all want documents—lots of them. If the liquidation committee agrees to the requests—and they don’t usually have much choice in the matter—then we make sure that the orders get filled.” Compton spoke quickly. She’d done this spiel before, and her delivery was practiced. She paused to see if I was still with her. I was.
“Central to these two activities is the third thing we do here: document management. It was the first task we had when we started, and none of the other work can go on without it. When we came on the job, it was like boarding one of those ghost ships in the Bermuda Triangle. You know, where everything looks normal but all the people are missing. Senior management was in jail or on the run, and the people who actually did the work, the traders, operations people, and accountants, had all been let go. And we couldn’t call any of them back, since they were all potential defendants. So we had an empty bank on our hands— a ghost ship. The only things that could tell us what the hell had been going on were the documents they’d left behind.
“But it was a huge mountain of paper, and organized filing was not MWB’s strong suit. To get—and keep—control of the documents we use a set of procedures and a computer system. The procedures are straightforward, even if the work itself isn’t. Every document we find on MWB premises is assigned a unique identification number, and is scanned in to a central documents database. Then, someone reviews it, classifies it, and writes an abstract of its contents, and all that goes into the database too. After that, the physical document goes offsite, to a warehouse out in Jersey we use as a storage center. From then on, any research we or the Parsons people need to do involving that document is done using the document database.” A chiming sound came from her computer, and Compton paused to glance at the screen. She clicked something and continued.
“Say, for example, that Parsons needs to review all the correspondence that took place between MWB and some particular client. Using the system, they can look at it by date, by subject, by department, by a bunch of other criteria—all online. Or say we get a request for documents, maybe from the U.S. attorneys. We use the system to find what they’ve asked for, and we have the guys in the storage center ship the hard copy. And we also use the system to keep track of who has asked for what items, and to record what we send, and where and when we send it.” She paused again, waiting for questions. This time I had some.
“Do only paper documents go into the database? What about e-mail? Or data from MWB’s accounting systems?”
Compton began nodding before I’d finished my question. “Yep, yep—we use all that stuff. E-mail and any other electronic documents go in the database, the same as paper—only we don’t have to scan them. We use their systems, too—their general ledger, their trading systems, their settlement systems—but that data doesn’t go into the documents database.”
“Is everything that’s supposed to be in there actually on the database at this point?”
“Almost. We’ve got everything from the offices worldwide, but there are some documents from offsite storage that we haven’t gotten to yet. That’s a lot of what you see on the shelves out there.”
“So you’ve got documents going back . . . how
“Litigation support is Brill’s responsibility, and it’s just a fancy name for sending documents to people. As you probably know, there are a bunch of criminal proceedings underway against former MWB employees, and more are coming. On top of that, a slew of civil actions are gearing up. That means that every day, day in and day out, the MWB liquidation committee gets requests—orders, really—to produce documents. Task force investigators, the U.S. attorney, defense counsel, civil plaintiffs, you name it—they all want documents—lots of them. If the liquidation committee agrees to the requests—and they don’t usually have much choice in the matter—then we make sure that the orders get filled.” Compton spoke quickly. She’d done this spiel before, and her delivery was practiced. She paused to see if I was still with her. I was.
“Central to these two activities is the third thing we do here: document management. It was the first task we had when we started, and none of the other work can go on without it. When we came on the job, it was like boarding one of those ghost ships in the Bermuda Triangle. You know, where everything looks normal but all the people are missing. Senior management was in jail or on the run, and the people who actually did the work, the traders, operations people, and accountants, had all been let go. And we couldn’t call any of them back, since they were all potential defendants. So we had an empty bank on our hands— a ghost ship. The only things that could tell us what the hell had been going on were the documents they’d left behind.
“But it was a huge mountain of paper, and organized filing was not MWB’s strong suit. To get—and keep—control of the documents we use a set of procedures and a computer system. The procedures are straightforward, even if the work itself isn’t. Every document we find on MWB premises is assigned a unique identification number, and is scanned in to a central documents database. Then, someone reviews it, classifies it, and writes an abstract of its contents, and all that goes into the database too. After that, the physical document goes offsite, to a warehouse out in Jersey we use as a storage center. From then on, any research we or the Parsons people need to do involving that document is done using the document database.” A chiming sound came from her computer, and Compton paused to glance at the screen. She clicked something and continued.
“Say, for example, that Parsons needs to review all the correspondence that took place between MWB and some particular client. Using the system, they can look at it by date, by subject, by department, by a bunch of other criteria—all online. Or say we get a request for documents, maybe from the U.S. attorneys. We use the system to find what they’ve asked for, and we have the guys in the storage center ship the hard copy. And we also use the system to keep track of who has asked for what items, and to record what we send, and where and when we send it.” She paused again, waiting for questions. This time I had some.
“Do only paper documents go into the database? What about e-mail? Or data from MWB’s accounting systems?”
Compton began nodding before I’d finished my question. “Yep, yep—we use all that stuff. E-mail and any other electronic documents go in the database, the same as paper—only we don’t have to scan them. We use their systems, too—their general ledger, their trading systems, their settlement systems—but that data doesn’t go into the documents database.”
“Is everything that’s supposed to be in there actually on the database at this point?”
“Almost. We’ve got everything from the offices worldwide, but there are some documents from offsite storage that we haven’t gotten to yet. That’s a lot of what you see on the shelves out there.”
“So you’ve got documents going back . . . how
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