Document Collection and Review

¶The available universe of Lehman e‐mail and other electronically stored documents is estimated at three petabytes of data – roughly the equivalent of 350 billion pages. The Examiner carefully selected a group of document custodians and search terms designed to cull out the most promising subset of Lehman electronic materials for review. In addition, the Examiner requested and received hard copy documents from Lehman and both electronic and hard copy documents from numerous third parties and Government agencies, including the Department of the Treasury, the SEC, the Federal Reserve, FRBNY, the Office of Thrift Supervision, the SIPA Trustee, Ernst & Young, JPMorgan, Barclays, Bank of America, HSBC, Citibank, Fitch, Moody's, S&P, and others.108

¶In total, the Examiner collected in excess of five million documents, estimated to comprise more than 40,000,000 pages. All of these documents have been converted to electronic form and are maintained on two computerized databases, Stratify and CaseLogistix. The Stratify database, which is housed and maintained on servers by the Debtors' professionals, Alvarez & Marsal, contains approximately four and a half million unique documents, and consists of collected Lehman e‐mails and attachments; the CaseLogistix database, which is housed and maintained by the Examiner's counsel, Jenner & Block, contains approximately seven hundred thousand unique documents, primarily consisting of third‐party productions.

¶Documents were reviewed on at least two levels. First level review was conducted by lawyers trained to identify documents of possible interest and to code the substantive areas to which the documents pertained; those so identified were subjected to further and more careful review by lawyers or financial advisors especially immersed in the earmarked subjects. In order to reduce the cost of review, the Examiner sought and obtained the Court's approval to retain contract attorneys.109 A group of more than 70 contract attorneys, supplemented by Jenner & Block attorneys, conducted first level reviews. All second level (and beyond) reviews were performed by Jenner & Block attorneys or Duff & Phelps professionals.

¶The Examiner estimates that he has reviewed approximately 34,000,000 pages of documents in the course of his investigation. The entire body of e‐mail in the Stratify database – 4,439,924 documents, approximately 26 million pages – has been reviewed.110 Approximately 340,000 of the CaseLogistix documents – roughly eight million pages – have been reviewed.111 Although a large number of the CaseLogistix documents were not reviewed, that database is fully searchable, and the Examiner is reasonably confident that the repeated and focused searches applied against that database have discovered most if not all of the most relevant documents.112

¶In most cases, documents were produced to the Examiner under stipulated protective orders, which are described in Appendix 5. Subject to those orders, the document databases created by the Examiner remain a resource for the estate and the parties. The database includes computerized tagging which will allow persons interested in making their own searches to narrow and focus search requests. The Examiner will work with the parties and the Court to resolve logistical and confidentiality issues so that the databases can become an asset available to all interested parties.