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TECH SUPPORT Surrounded by cigarette papers B.C.'s tobacco litigation focuses on alleged wrongful conduct spanning 50 years, so just imagine the amount of documents involved. Here's the tale of how one law firm is taming the paper tiger. BY GERRY BLACKWELL LLP working on the province of British Columbia's lawsuit against 14 foreign and Canadian tobacco companies to re- cover billions of dollars in health-care costs. "The suit involves alleged I wrongful conduct over 50 years," explains BH&T partner Kim- berly Kuntz, head of the firm's tobacco litigation team. "They have to produce their docu- ments spanning that period. So we're dealing with literally millions of pages." BH&T, a 90-lawyer Van- couver litigation firm, has been working on the file since 1997. With the 2005 Supreme Court of Can- ada decision in British Columbia v. Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd. confirming the prov- ince's right to sue, and to name foreign com- panies, it's full speed ahead — sort of. Kuntz an- ticipates the case will be in court by the fall of 2010. "If it's not the biggest litigation ever in Canada, it's definitely one of them," says Kuntz. "And I think, based on the number of documents we're dealing with, it probably is the largest lawsuit in Canadian history." From the beginning, the firm knew it would be dealing with f ever litigators needed technology to help them make it through the night, it is the team at Bull Housser & Tupper massive volumes and that savvy use of technology would be a key to suc- cess. It bit the bullet and invested in a powerful set of software tools and the infrastructure needed to handle virtually every aspect of document production, storage, search, and retrieval. Lawyers on the file use Con- cordance, the electronic discov- ery and litigation document management system from Lexis Nexis, to search header infor- mation in lists of documents and full text of documents already produced, which in- cludes millions of pages from earlier litigation in the U.S. Much of it is available pub- licly online. The production process for this case, inter- rupted by the Supreme Court challenge, is still underway. Team members use another soft- ware system, based on Lotus Notes from IBM, to organize and retrieve internal docu- ments, including pleadings and legal briefs on factual evidence and points of law. The BH&T information technology team customized Notes with subfolders for each category of document. "Without the tech- nology," says Kuntz, "we would have literally walls of binders with [just] our pleadings, and you can imagine how difficult it www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com OC T OBER 2008 23 ILLUSTRATION: MICK COULAS