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.
