U.S. prosecutors have just unloaded a massive amount of discovery documents, according to lawyers for former FTX CEO Sam-Bankman Fried on Aug. 25.
In the relevant court filing, lawyers broadly objected to the government’s intention of opening access to discovery materials — that is, evidence and legal information — while Bankman-Fried is held at the Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn (MDC).
Lawyers emphasized that the amount of information at play is an issue, stating:
“We further object to the Government’s production, just yesterday, of an additional 4 million pages of discovery. The Government cannot be allowed to dump millions of pages on the defense less than six weeks before trial.”
Elsewhere in the filing, lawyers said that discovery information amounts to terabytes worth of data to date, adding that millions of additional pages are forthcoming.
Bankman-Fried’s lawyers also complained that the government has no plan to deliver the discovery documents to their client at MDC despite his rapidly approaching trial date. As such, lawyers urged the court to provide Bankman-Fried with internet access. They stated that current plans, which allow Bankman-Fried to meet with lawyers twice a week, are not sufficient to accomplish the data review that is needed.
“No substitute”
Lawyers argued that there is “no substitute” for Bankman-Fried’s work on the case, asserting that their client has extensive knowledge of companies involved in events and is uniquely capable of locating relevant documents “quickly and efficiently.” Though Bankman-Fried has been provided with a laptop, lawyers said that this device has limited internet access and does not allow him to collaborate with lawyers or access his previous work.
Bankman-Fried’s lawyers further noted that their client previously compiled specific data into a spreadsheet with millions of cells. They said that he spent between 80 and 100 hours per week reviewing discovery prior to his imprisonment.
In light of the situation, lawyers urged for Bankman-Fried’s temporary release, which would allow the former FTX CEO to work with the defense and access the internet five days per week in a dedicated courthouse working space.
Lawyers have pressed for those release conditions since at least Aug. 18.
While I think that he deserves to be held accountable, I agree that that's a silly amount of pages. Even if you were to understand fully 100 pages a day for your case and not forget any of it, it'd still take 109 years to be ready. I know there are teams for it, but still it's a silly amount of pages
A lot of lawyering is done automatically at this point. 30,000 emails at a page each email can be digested and have relevant information produced within a half hour.
Packages like Litify, Lawmatics, and Clio exist to move terabytes of data into five page summaries in about two to three hours if you have the right analyst working it.
Law offices complain like this to see if the judge will give them some extra time because extra time is extra time, but something like 10TB for complex business cases is pretty normal run of the mill stuff for some of the top tier analysis software.
Millions of pages just sounds big if you try doing by hand, but no law office at this level has some paralegal or team of paralegals trying to run through millions of Excel spreadsheets or emails. Law offices have long since left that whole error prone approach.
Given what’s been said about the data so far, even in the most complex situation, two weeks tops for any software product worth its salt to chew through all of it and have a solid foundation to what’s being presented.
Shit like this has been automated for like the last fifteen almost twenty years now. So many people think automation coming to kill all the jobs, man most people don’t even realize how many it’s already killed.
Wow very interesting, thanks for sharing.
The numbers sound big (and they are) but a lot of it will be stuff that can be scanned out pretty quickly. He does not have to read and absorb every word, just understand which particular sets of records are being presented as evidence of criminality.
I do agree that he should be given enough time to prepare his case. He can stay in prison for as long as it takes. Had he not broken his bail conditions, he could do it from the comfort of his parents' home. But he did, so he can't.
Maybe don't commit 4 million pages worth of crimes.
Maybe everyone is entitled to a fucking fair trial? How about that one?
Jesus christ some people
Which it will be. Do you think lawyers/their staff need read every single word on every single page or something? That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works
Stop being unreasonable and start realizing that parsing, or even receiving and storing 2 terabytes of documents is beyond a lawyer's technological abilities. There is no world in which 2tb of documents are needed for these discoveries.
Also how do you make sure you haven't missed something?
Because If it's in the discovery, you're compliant. You can hide what you don't want them to find next to stock_market_fluctuations_2022-10-05T05.55.to.06.00_xmv.csv down 14 folders in google drive
So no, not fair
Just for an idea of what 2tb feels like, if you read the bytes sequentially to do a single string search, the most performant algorithms go about a speed of 10GB/s. That is 3.3 minutes and you're not even case insensitive still
lmao you don't even know what legal tools exist to examine this volume of documents.
Do some research if you're going to be up in arms about stuff. Do even more research when you decide to be up in arms about how a billionaire gaming the system is somehow being treated unfairly after ripping millions of dollars off people, creating these terabyte repositories of illegal transactions.
Literally go ahead and name one
If you've ever worked in IT with attorneys you'd know better
But go ahead, tell me one name of a "legal tool" that can parse 2TB. Actually name any single one. Go ahead. Biggest one starts with an E.