Canadian Lawyer 4Students

22 F A L L 2 0 1 5 C A N A D I A N L a w y e r 4 S T U D E N T S T o be part of one of the longest techno- logically-driven, white-collar-crime jury trials in Canadian history was more than Tala Khoury could hope for during her articles with Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP. But that is exactly what the Osgoode Hall Law School graduate got when she joined the Faskens team in the courtroom for eight months helping de- fend TPG Technology Consulting against the Competition Bureau in Ottawa. TPG (along with other IT companies) was accused of bid rigging due to an agreement the consulting group made to share contrac- tors in order to fulfil government IT jobs. "I thought it would be lucky if I could work on one or two trials throughout the 10 months," says Khoury. "I got this oppor- tunity and I jumped on it." e trial was one of a kind for several reasons. A criminal jury trial is practically unheard of for offences under the Compe- tition Act, because the accused normally plead out so the process is faster, especially in cases like this one, where there is no real case law available under the act, Khoury notes. "An eight-month jury trial in white- collar crime is a very rare occurrence in Canada," says Peter Mantas, a partner with Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP, who was in charge of the defence. "It took us a month just to select the jury." TPG was accused of colluding with other bidders selling IT services to the fed- eral government. e Crown said the com- pany and others were guilty of bid rigging because they agreed to share contractors to fulfil a government IT job. ey faced jail time and being barred from work- ing with the government if convicted. e trial ended April 27 in 60 not-guilty verdicts from the 11-member jury. From a procedural standpoint, one of the most unique aspects of the trial, however, was the degree to which technology was used in the courtroom. "ere were hundreds of thousands of actual documents that were disclosed to the defence and they totalled over one million pages, so to prepare for cross-examination and examination of witnesses during the trial I had to go through and search the dis- closure to find documents that would sup- port our case," says Khoury. Mantas says the trial, which began in September of 2014 and ended in April 2015, had to be executed electronically due to the sheer number of documents. "One of the courtrooms in Ottawa was es- pecially wired and set up in order to con- duct such a trial," he says. ere were jury screens, public screens, screens in front of the judge, and the defen- dants. e trial also included a large num- ber of self-represented litigants. Over and above that there were screens that various parties had to handle their own documents as well as screens to view a real-time tran- scription of the case. For the Faskens team alone, there were seven screens delivering information at any given time. Khoury was one of the four articling stu- dents selected to participate in the trial be- cause she had impressed the partners. While her job was originally to help manage the large number of documents, pulling files, and keeping things organized, she got up to speed quickly once she joined the case the partners had been living with for 10 years. Khoury would track documents as they were being filed electronically and find other documents that were potentially use- ful to conducting a cross-examination. "As lawyers, we were thinking about how we would respond to this type of evidence; that's the kind of thing that we expect good lawyers to do. We don't expect it from a stu- dent, especially a student who has recently come to a case," explains Mantas. "It was the kind of work that I would expect from a senior associate, quite frankly." Because Khoury rose to the challenge, the Faskens team began involving her more in strategic discussions with the op- posing counsel. "What I was doing was being a docu- ment liaison for the defence," she explains. A lot of her work consisted of searching through e-mails via dates, key words, and sender names using litigation soware provided by Faskens. "A lot of it was just keeping really good notes of the docu- ments that we wanted." Tala Khoury had a front-row seat for a mega-trial that pushed the boundaries of current courtroom technology. JENNIFER BROWN

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