U.S. government hits Bankman-Fried and attorneys with 4 million pages of discovery. His lawyers argue that the government is overwhelming their client, without allowing him to prepare for court.
U.S. government hits Bankman-Fried and attorneys with 4 million pages of discovery. His lawyers argue that the government is overwhelming their client, without allowing him to prepare for court.
U.S. prosecutors have unloaded a massive amount of discovery documents, lawyers for former FTX CEO Sam-Bankman Fried said on Aug. 25.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/2935925
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.
So if you break too many crimes, it’s too hard to defend? Sounds like the same whining coming from Trumps lawyers.
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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
36A 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.
37Wow very interesting, thanks for sharing.
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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.
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If they were using Quickbooks for FTX accounting, I could see how this could be overwhelming.
No sympathy, bro.
13Guess SBF should have spent his time not intimidating/tampering witnesses, if he needed the Internet for his defense preparation
9This.
They might have had an argument that this is sanctionable discovery, but his client broke the rules so many times that the court begged the prosecution to ask for punishments against sbf and he finally got his bond revoked.
This filing does not exist in a vacuum and this is the definition of fuck around and find out.
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I hope they didn't print 4 million pages and gave it to them digitally.
According to some quick googling and calculator exercises, that's like 400 pine trees and at 50 pages per minute would take about 55.5 days of non-stop printing. Please check my math.
8you forgot to account for paper jams and calls to hp support because a new cartridge wasn't recognized by their firmware as 'genuine... then the time to run to costco for a couple non-hp printers to finish the job.
3Checked math, you're right. And 50ppm is only a slightly slower laser office-scale printer, so fair enough on that too. I have seen a 100ppm printer in a court, but even still that's literally weeks of printing.
We really need to re-evaluate this whole legal paper data storage model, the judicial system alone must be chewing through the Amazon.
2I'd imagine that even if it were, they'd be using more than one printer
1Cheers! Thanks for double checking. I want to believe they had it on a thumb drive but everything in me says it was truckloads of boxes.
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6The key manipulative point is that it's measured in "pages". Everything depends on what the files actually are, not what they would be if you printed them out.
And I suppose that many of these files are from the company itself. If so, the defense and CEO had them for a long time.
4That is insane. I didn't expect the government's attorneys to textbook abuse the discovery process
How about some good faith from the fucking government
-1He's a billionaire with a seven figure (?) bail.
Why can't he get enough lawyers to filter what's important and have his primary team review it?
He was not in jail, but he tried to influence witnesses.
Now he's in jail and complaining about it. He deserves no second chance.
11More than a terabyte of documents.
You're not talking about a second chance you're talking about not having a single chance
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How many of those 4 millions are written by chatGPT?
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