Day 164 - 26 Sep 95 - Page 06


     
     1        and Virginia.
     2
     3   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  What does "NW" mean?
     4
     5   MR. RAMPTON:  North West, I take it.  1909 Kay Street, North
     6        West.
     7
     8   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  How big is the district of Columbia?
     9
    10   MR. RAMPTON:  Pretty big.
    11
    12   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  I know the City of Washington is in the
    13        district of Columbia, is that it?
    14
    15   MR. RAMPTON:  More or less, yes, I think so.
    16
    17   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  Yes.
    18
    19   MR. MORRIS:  I spoke to our witness Brian Lipsett last night who
    20        had sent us these printouts by E mail because you were
    21        asking me the origin of them.  He told me that:  "The items
    22        were down loaded from a computer terminal connected to Mead
    23        Data Service Nexis/Lexis Computer Database which contains
    24        full text copies of articles from a large sample of
    25        newspapers.  In some cases references to McDonald's
    26        restaurants are contained in very large articles.  So
    27        I simply focused on the text in the articles which deals
    28        with McDonald's and left unrelated material out of the
    29        reprint.  The Nexis/Lexis Database system accomplishes this
    30        task automatically once I have told it what to do.  They
    31        are all derived from full text on-line electronic
    32        representations of news articles published around the US".
    33        In fact, there are only a couple of papers, I think.  He
    34        says that he can provide any further assistance that is
    35        needed on that matter.
    36
    37        Going to Mr. Rampton's response to our application, first
    38        of all, about Store Hygiene, I will not say a great deal,
    39        but Mr. Rampton was saying with this section, and even more
    40        with the employment section, that either it was completely
    41        trivial, marginal, irrelevant and not worth him even
    42        thinking about, or he would have to, you know, increase the
    43        length of trial by months in order to deal with these
    44        allegations.
    45
    46        So I think that cannot both be true.  If the Plaintiffs do
    47        not feel they are very significant, then that is their
    48        position and they are not obligated to pull out all the
    49        stops in order to -----
    50 
    51   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  I think what he is saying is that he would 
    52        argue that they are marginal, but if I think they are 
    53        marginal I will not give you leave.  If I give you leave,
    54        then Mr. Rampton has to think:  "Well, the judge may not
    55        think they are marginal, do we have to chase them up?"
    56
    57   MR. RAMPTON:  My Lord, unless I am mistaken, I do not take what
    58        Mr. Morris said as a concession that he is not entitled to
    59        discovery should leave be given or he does not want
    60        discovery if I do not think that they are important.

Prev Next Index