Consortium Wins for Bridge Collapse Victims

We all know that technological advances are enabling us to do things that wouldn't have been possible only a few years ago. The litigation resulting from the I-35W Bridge Collapse in Minneapolis is an example of how technology contributed to a speedy and successful conclusion for our clients. In litigation support, technology plays an especially crucial role when there are many data and document sources as well as many parties working together to review the data.

Background

When the I-35W Bridge collapsed on Aug. 1, 2007, it killed 13 people and impacted more than 100 others who were injured. Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi L.L.P. (RKMC) led a consortium of 17 law firms that provided legal services to many of the victims. (While many of the firms in the Consortium provided services at a reduced rate, RKMC provided legal services pro bono.)

The Consortium did not immediately file a lawsuit, but instead lobbied the Minnesota State Legislature to establish a compensation fund for the victims and their survivors. RKMC felt this appropriate as the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) was responsible for maintaining the I-35W Bridge. In May 2008, the Minnesota legislature formally approved an unprecedented and historic $37 million victims' compensation fund for those who were injured or who lost loved ones in the accident.

The Consortium also pursued compensation from a construction company that was re-surfacing the bridge at the time of its collapse. (In 2009, this construction company settled with the Consortium for a confidential amount.)

In November 2008, the results of the National Transportation Safety Board's (NTSB) investigation into the cause of the collapse were released; the NTSB concluded that the cause of the collapse was a design flaw related to gusset plates installed on the bridge when the bridge was built in the 1960s.

RKMC's engineering consultants, however, were not satisfied with the NTSB assessment. They studied video footage of the collapse captured by a security camera at the Army Corps of Engineers building near the bridge, components of the bridge itself, and key pieces of wreckage. The engineers felt the video showed that the collapse of the structure did not initiate with a failure of the gusset plates, as the NTSB believed. The engineers felt that roller bearings on the bridge that should have been moving, but were not, triggered the collapse.

The consultants opined that the engineering firm under contract to the state should have been aware of the condition of the roller bearings if they had been properly calculating load and temperature ranges relative to the structural condition of the bridge.

The Consortium then filed suit against the engineering firm on behalf of the firm's clients.

One Database

With a potentially massive volume of data and so many law firms ' including the engineering consultants RKMC hired ' needing access to the same database and work product, the decision was made to outsource the database. Pitney Bowes Management Services was hired to provide data processing and hosting services, (which it provided at a greatly reduced price, due to the nature of the case and the fact that we were providing all services pro bono) using the ReviewESI platform. Many members of the Consortium were small firms with no litigation support departments and little experience using database software. For these firms, ReviewESI was very easy to learn, and even if they were not frequent users of the database, the simplicity of the interface and tagging features allowed them to quickly recall how to navigate within the database when they returned to the reviewing task. In addition to its simplicity, our previous experiences with the platform had proven it to be robust and very stable. Documents could be batched for review, allowing specific groups of documents to be fed to different reviewers. Some were doing first pass review to exclude obvious junk, while others were doing a more in-depth second pass review to analyze potentially relevant documents, and still others were looking at very key or hot documents.

In total, Pitney Bowes processed and loaded 352.70 GBs of native files, plus 286.97 GBs, or 1,665,930 pages, of .tiff and JPG Images.

Duplicate Identification And the Search for
Critical Documents

The volume of documents produced was large, because the time period was considerable, as the bridge had been designed in the early 1960s and completed in 1967. We were now wading through the documentation from the 1960s forward.

One wrinkle complicated the review: Shortly after the bridge fell, the state began posting PDF versions of the bridge-related documents on its Web site. These included inspection reports and correspondence regarding the bridge. Pitney Bowes processed and loaded these into its database in advance of filing suit against the defendant engineering firm.

Because these documents were originally downloaded, pre-litigation, from the state site, when counsel for the defendant engineering firm later produced many of the same documents to RKMC as part of litigation, attorneys had a new challenge. The produced versions of the documents now contained Bates numbers and had different file names, and we realized we needed a way to locate the duplicate documents within the database so that time wasn't wasted re-reviewing them, and also so that the produced version of the documents could be used at depositions as needed.

As part of the review, we wanted to find more of some document types that were located early on and knew to be key, such as inspection reports and computations from the defendant engineering firm that referenced very specific terms.

Again, technology and Pitney Bowes were able to help. Using Equivio software, it was able to compare documents on a sliding scale that showed which ones shared the greatest number of similar words. This identification of near-duplicate documents allowed us to exclude some types of documents from the review set, as well as to group the key, like documents together (for instance, a draft inspection report and the final inspection report). We focused this duplicate-identifying process on a subset of the database, comprising 8.8 GBs of files, and 9,384 .tiff images.

In order to effectively concentrate the efforts of the attorneys within the Consortium, and to help reduce the time necessary to review, RKMC reviewers used keyword searches to eliminate large percentages of documents that were not relevant to the search for documents pointing to negligent or erroneous inspections or assessments.

Finally, Pitney Bowes loaded and foldered photos of the bridge taken both before and after the collapse, organized into subfolders by the date each photo was taken. This way, users could easily locate relevant photos simply by navigating to a folder, rather than having to do date searches to try to find a specific set of photos.

A Swift Conclusion

Ultimately, we found e-mails that turned out to be critical. One was from a project manager at the defendant engineering firm who wrote that another engineer also working for the defendant engineering firm was trying too hard to advise MnDOT that the bridge was okay, even though it was clearly overstressed. We reviewed additional e-mails and Excel files. Another e-mail from the defendant engineering firm stated it did not want to calculate actual capacities of certain bridge components because it was too much work. Settlement talks heated up after these documents came to light, and after a hearing regarding a motion to allow the Consortium plaintiffs to seek punitive damages from the defendant engineering firm. Although discovery only began in September 2009, we were finished with the review of all documents, and had found our critical documents, by January 2010.

In August 2010, the defendant engineering firm agreed to pay more than $40 million to settle the claims of the Consortium clients. An additional $1.5 million was recovered from the company, which the attorneys for the bridge victims donated toward construction of a memorial honoring those who died that day.

In total, more than $77 million has been recovered for RKMC clients who were injured or lost loved ones on Aug. 1, 2007. We also believe that a larger public interest goal ' discovering the actual cause of the bridge collapse ' was met. RKMC attorneys and staff devoted more than 20,000 pro bono hours in our efforts to successfully settle this case, and there is no question that the litigation support technology employed was a key contributor to this outcome.

We all know that technological advances are enabling us to do things that wouldn't have been possible only a few years ago. The litigation resulting from the I-35W Bridge Collapse in Minneapolis is an example of how technology contributed to a speedy and successful conclusion for our clients. In litigation support, technology plays an especially crucial role when there are many data and document sources as well as many parties working together to review the data.

Background

When the I-35W Bridge collapsed on Aug. 1, 2007, it killed 13 people and impacted more than 100 others who were injured. Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi L.L.P. (RKMC) led a consortium of 17 law firms that provided legal services to many of the victims. (While many of the firms in the Consortium provided services at a reduced rate, RKMC provided legal services pro bono.)

The Consortium did not immediately file a lawsuit, but instead lobbied the Minnesota State Legislature to establish a compensation fund for the victims and their survivors. RKMC felt this appropriate as the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) was responsible for maintaining the I-35W Bridge. In May 2008, the Minnesota legislature formally approved an unprecedented and historic $37 million victims' compensation fund for those who were injured or who lost loved ones in the accident.

The Consortium also pursued compensation from a construction company that was re-surfacing the bridge at the time of its collapse. (In 2009, this construction company settled with the Consortium for a confidential amount.)

In November 2008, the results of the National Transportation Safety Board's (NTSB) investigation into the cause of the collapse were released; the NTSB concluded that the cause of the collapse was a design flaw related to gusset plates installed on the bridge when the bridge was built in the 1960s.

RKMC's engineering consultants, however, were not satisfied with the NTSB assessment. They studied video footage of the collapse captured by a security camera at the Army Corps of Engineers building near the bridge, components of the bridge itself, and key pieces of wreckage. The engineers felt the video showed that the collapse of the structure did not initiate with a failure of the gusset plates, as the NTSB believed. The engineers felt that roller bearings on the bridge that should have been moving, but were not, triggered the collapse.

The consultants opined that the engineering firm under contract to the state should have been aware of the condition of the roller bearings if they had been properly calculating load and temperature ranges relative to the structural condition of the bridge.

The Consortium then filed suit against the engineering firm on behalf of the firm's clients.

One Database

With a potentially massive volume of data and so many law firms ' including the engineering consultants RKMC hired ' needing access to the same database and work product, the decision was made to outsource the database. Pitney Bowes Management Services was hired to provide data processing and hosting services, (which it provided at a greatly reduced price, due to the nature of the case and the fact that we were providing all services pro bono) using the ReviewESI platform. Many members of the Consortium were small firms with no litigation support departments and little experience using database software. For these firms, ReviewESI was very easy to learn, and even if they were not frequent users of the database, the simplicity of the interface and tagging features allowed them to quickly recall how to navigate within the database when they returned to the reviewing task. In addition to its simplicity, our previous experiences with the platform had proven it to be robust and very stable. Documents could be batched for review, allowing specific groups of documents to be fed to different reviewers. Some were doing first pass review to exclude obvious junk, while others were doing a more in-depth second pass review to analyze potentially relevant documents, and still others were looking at very key or hot documents.

In total, Pitney Bowes processed and loaded 352.70 GBs of native files, plus 286.97 GBs, or 1,665,930 pages, of .tiff and JPG Images.

Duplicate Identification And the Search for
Critical Documents

The volume of documents produced was large, because the time period was considerable, as the bridge had been designed in the early 1960s and completed in 1967. We were now wading through the documentation from the 1960s forward.

One wrinkle complicated the review: Shortly after the bridge fell, the state began posting PDF versions of the bridge-related documents on its Web site. These included inspection reports and correspondence regarding the bridge. Pitney Bowes processed and loaded these into its database in advance of filing suit against the defendant engineering firm.

Because these documents were originally downloaded, pre-litigation, from the state site, when counsel for the defendant engineering firm later produced many of the same documents to RKMC as part of litigation, attorneys had a new challenge. The produced versions of the documents now contained Bates numbers and had different file names, and we realized we needed a way to locate the duplicate documents within the database so that time wasn't wasted re-reviewing them, and also so that the produced version of the documents could be used at depositions as needed.

As part of the review, we wanted to find more of some document types that were located early on and knew to be key, such as inspection reports and computations from the defendant engineering firm that referenced very specific terms.

Again, technology and Pitney Bowes were able to help. Using Equivio software, it was able to compare documents on a sliding scale that showed which ones shared the greatest number of similar words. This identification of near-duplicate documents allowed us to exclude some types of documents from the review set, as well as to group the key, like documents together (for instance, a draft inspection report and the final inspection report). We focused this duplicate-identifying process on a subset of the database, comprising 8.8 GBs of files, and 9,384 .tiff images.

In order to effectively concentrate the efforts of the attorneys within the Consortium, and to help reduce the time necessary to review, RKMC reviewers used keyword searches to eliminate large percentages of documents that were not relevant to the search for documents pointing to negligent or erroneous inspections or assessments.

Finally, Pitney Bowes loaded and foldered photos of the bridge taken both before and after the collapse, organized into subfolders by the date each photo was taken. This way, users could easily locate relevant photos simply by navigating to a folder, rather than having to do date searches to try to find a specific set of photos.

A Swift Conclusion

Ultimately, we found e-mails that turned out to be critical. One was from a project manager at the defendant engineering firm who wrote that another engineer also working for the defendant engineering firm was trying too hard to advise MnDOT that the bridge was okay, even though it was clearly overstressed. We reviewed additional e-mails and Excel files. Another e-mail from the defendant engineering firm stated it did not want to calculate actual capacities of certain bridge components because it was too much work. Settlement talks heated up after these documents came to light, and after a hearing regarding a motion to allow the Consortium plaintiffs to seek punitive damages from the defendant engineering firm. Although discovery only began in September 2009, we were finished with the review of all documents, and had found our critical documents, by January 2010.

In August 2010, the defendant engineering firm agreed to pay more than $40 million to settle the claims of the Consortium clients. An additional $1.5 million was recovered from the company, which the attorneys for the bridge victims donated toward construction of a memorial honoring those who died that day.

In total, more than $77 million has been recovered for RKMC clients who were injured or lost loved ones on Aug. 1, 2007. We also believe that a larger public interest goal ' discovering the actual cause of the bridge collapse ' was met. RKMC attorneys and staff devoted more than 20,000 pro bono hours in our efforts to successfully settle this case, and there is no question that the litigation support technology employed was a key contributor to this outcome.