Systems Access
¶Answering the questions posed by the Examiner Order necessarily required an extensive investigation and review of Lehman's operating, trading, valuation, financial, accounting and other data systems. Interrogating those systems proved particularly challenging, first because the vast majority of the systems had been transferred and were under the control of Barclays; by the time of the Examiner's appointment, Barclays had integrated its own proprietary and confidential data into some of the systems, so Barclays had legitimate concerns about granting access to those systems. Although it took some time, Barclays was cooperative and those issues were for the most part resolved.
¶The second challenge was more daunting. At the time of its bankruptcy filing, Lehman maintained a patchwork of over 2,600 software systems and applications. The Examiner, in consultation with his financial advisors, decided early on that it would not be cost effective to undertake the enormous effort and expense that would be required to learn and access each of these 2,600 systems. Rather, the Examiner directed his financial advisors to identify and acquire an in‐depth understanding of the most promising of the systems.
34¶The Examiner's financial advisors ultimately requested access to 96 of the most relevant systems.113 The process of identifying those presented it own challenges. Many of Lehman's systems were arcane, outdated or non‐standard. Becoming proficient enough to use the systems required training in some cases, study in others, and trial and error experimentation in others. In numerous instances, the Examiner's professionals would request access to a particular system, expend the time necessary to learn how to use the system and only then discover that access to two or three additional systems was required to answer the necessary questions. Lehman's systems were highly interdependent, but their relationships were difficult to decipher and not well documented. It took extraordinary effort to untangle these systems to obtain the necessary information.
¶Because some systems were in current use by Barclays in its operations, Barclays limited access to 79 of the requested 96 systems to "read‐only." Read‐only access made the review and organization of data more difficult. And in some cases, read‐only access was severely restricted. For some systems, the ability to query the data and search for a particular transaction was limited to certain parameters. For others, the Examiner was denied direct access altogether, requiring the need to request that searches be done by Barclays's technology personnel, who would then forward findings to the Examiner.
35¶Finally, the accessibility of data was complicated by the fact that the filing of a bankruptcy petition by Lehman came with virtually no advance preparation. The filing did not occur at the close of a month or a quarter when Lehman would prepare reconciliations and summaries of its financial data. Record‐keeping quickly fell into disarray upon Lehman's hurried filing. Reconstructing data during this period has proven a challenge not only for the Examiner but for all who must rely upon this data in Lehman's Chapter 11 proceedings.
¶In the end, the Examiner's financial advisors were generally able to get sufficient data to inform and support the Examiner's Report, but there may be areas, specifically noted where appropriate in the text below, where data limitations need to be considered.