Situation

BlueCross BlueShield Minnesota and the Minnesota Attorney General’s office sued the tobacco companies in 1998 to recover costs of healthcare related to smoking. The end result of the suit was a $6.6 billion settlement with the tobacco industry that also forced key restrictions on cigarette ads and marketing.

During the trial a need was discovered to make the evidence available to the general public as the various pieces of evidence were introduced at trial.

Strategy

• Develop a solution to allow litigation support personnel to post evidence on the Internet
• Provide functionality to allow for search all current evidence
• Display all evidence in a secure, consistent, format that could not be modified
• Develop a timely solution so that the public could have as much access to as much evidence as soon as possible

Solution

A web application was developed using Index Server to index PDF documents to enable full text searching of trial exhibits. The typical process was that after each day of the trial litigation support personnel would merge graphic representations of the actual paper documents with textual information about each exhibit to form one or more PDF files. These files would then be indexed by the search engine. This allowed for indexing of the trial exhibits. In addition to this several web pages were developed that allowed for searching of the newly generated PDF documents by exhibit number, attribute (such as author or publication date) and/or text contained in a particular exhibit (full-text queries).

Results

The public both in the United States and Internationally was better informed about the trial. This was done by providing an Internet-based application that allowed for quick searching of trial exhibits as well as provided document presentation in a consistent, secure, format.