Overview

We are a Dallas-based private equity firm that provides its clients vehicles for investing funds in various areas, including commodities trading, art investments, and motion picture productions. Given the financial and investment nature of the business, litigation is inevitable, particularly in the motion picture financing category, where contract disputes frequently escalate to criminal prosecution. Oftentimes such activities occur across international borders, thereby increasing the complexity of such cases for us.

In addition, because the elements required for proof of criminal culpability differs among jurisdictions, the same cases must be approached differently when presenting the issue to authorities in differing jurisdictions. What starts as a single case often develops into two or more cases depending on the number of jurisdictions involved. Therefore, a case with the same facts and physical evidence needs to be applied differently to prove specific charges in an effort to serve the requirements of the jurisdictions involved.

This problem was more acute in one of our cases involving stolen funds, forged documents and other illegal activities that crossed four international jurisdictions, including the US, EU and the UK. Each jurisdiction was concerned with a different aspect: fraud against a national company and misuse of the corporation in one jurisdiction; forgery and bank theft in another; the use of telecommunications to commit fraud in a third; and bank fraud in a fourth. The complaint had to be prepared differently for each of the four jurisdictions and since the U.S. is on a different planet from the other countries involved, it too required a different perspective in presenting the information.

As a former peace officer and retired attorney, none of this was particularly intimidating to me, except for the sheer amount of information to be tracked. Where an act occurs across jurisdictional boundaries it may be a crime or a tort in both jurisdictions and possibly in still other jurisdictions as well, depending upon such factors as the nationalities of the accused and the victim. Because the elements required for proof of criminal culpability differs among jurisdictions the same charges must be approached differently when presenting the complaint to authorities of differing jurisdictions. The result is that what appears to be one case is for all practical purposes two or more utilizing the same facts and physical evidence, but with the evidence applied differently to prove different elements as required in the various jurisdictions involved.

The Challenge

We realized it was time to seek out a system that would handle both evidence management and our operational needs. Producing detailed fact chronologies in a useful form was critical too, as well as organizing evidence by type and related issue, production release, etc.

The system not only had to let us to work over the Internet, but more specifically, let each of our local counsel work on-line from their jurisdictions and locally off-line if needed — with the system synchronizing in both directions quickly and accurately when counsel reconnected via the Internet. Moreover, the product had to be easy to install, easy to learn and well supported so all could get up and running quickly.

Why we chose MasterFile

This is not a paid endorsement, I am not related to anyone at MasterFile, and I had not met any of the people at MasterFile until I found the program by Googling. I’m very glad I did find them. It has saved us a great deal of time and money, and made possible an otherwise impossible situation. I have come to the realization that for our needs it isn’t a question of why MasterFile is the best solution, it is the only solution — and also, exceptionally easy to use. Without MasterFile we simply could not accomplish our goals without hiring several assistants to perform the tasks MasterFile handles very efficiently.

MasterFile has been extremely useful in that the document profiles and extracts allow the same evidence to be presented to different jurisdictions with appropriate emphasis for each case, without having to maintain completely separate files. Several relational database systems were considered, but none offered the flexibility provided by MasterFile. The same flexibility would be useful if I were still practising and was representing several clients involved in the same or similar litigation, or one or more clients with cases in more than one jurisdiction.

Since a great deal of travel is involved in my business it is also very useful to be able to synchronize versions of the files on my office computer and my portable computer, as well as to carry backups of a case on a USB flash drive that fits in my pocket. While this is theoretically possible with other programs, none have had the convenience, ease and speed of MasterFile.

Our use of MasterFile has been about evenly divided between scanned documents and those sent electronically. The Evidence Cruncher and its OCR characteristics have greatly simplified the process of producing extracts from the scanned documents. Those extracts are critical to what we have to accomplish.

As documents are loaded, they are profiled with a few pieces of information, such as date, author, type and description. You have the option of further tying the documents to your issues, topics and facts, or during the document review phase once documents are loaded. I chose to do review as I loaded documents which had several advantages not appreciated early in the process. In particular, and probably most critical, is that you are forced early in the process to decide at least some of the basic issues to be proved so that your efforts are properly directed from the beginning. Then, the thought process of deciding how the documents I was profiling related to other profiles and to the issues, topics and facts helped establish the logical basis for presenting a case. Furthermore, MasterFile’s ability to modify issues, topics, facts, players and the profiles and extracts themselves, either individually or globally throughout the entire database, is an extremely important feature which saves an incredible amount of time.