John Rosenthal Discusses Scope of Discovery in United States v. Trump with Legaltech News

Winston & Strawn partner John Rosenthal spoke with Legaltech News about the 8.5-terabyte initial production in discovery for the United States v. Trump trial, which totals more than 11.5 million pages. Many e-discovery professionals say that the use of “pages” does not capture the true scope of discovery and the number of documents may be much smaller.

“Rule of thumb is between four and six pages per document. So when you do that conversion, the numbers are really a lot smaller than 11.5 million,” John said. This could bring down the number of actual documents closer to about 2.3 million, he added, which is “a Herculean task, [but] it would be doable with today’s modern technology.”

“This is not the normal case because the defendant has had a boatload of lawyers in multiple cases that have been looking at some version of a lot of these documents for months or probably a couple of years,” John noted. “By way of example, the million documents the House Select Committee has produced, first of all, a lot of them are organized and, again, the key ones are outlined. … I would be shocked if some version of Trump’s lawyers has not pored over those documents over the last year and a half.”

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