They entered a light-filled conference room in the corner of the building. Audrey placed her laptop on the white laminate table and pulled up a chart that showed a summary of the plaintiff’s allegations—that Sebastian was only allowed to provide such news via corporate press releases and filings, not via Facebook. The plaintiff hadn’t seen Sebastian’s Facebook update and thus didn’t sell his stock when others did, so he was harmed.

Audrey clicked on the next slide and said, “But his discovery production is helpful. I think he heard about the update that day. If he decided not to sell, that’s his own fault, and we win the case.” She moved to the next slide. “His discovery production is filled with folders of stock research. He does extensive analysis before he invests in a stock. At a minimum, we should be able to prove he’s an experienced investor who should be held to a higher standard.” She switched to another document on her laptop. “More importantly for the case, I think he gets automated news alerts on his stocks, as suggested by this chart I created. This column shows the time the news alert was issued and this column shows the time of the news alert printout in his discovery production. Here’s a news alert on United getting the Turkey route at 3:06 p.m. His printout of that news article is stamped 3:10 p.m. So he printed out the news alert four minutes after the announcement. And this repeats across the majority of his stock holdings. So, either he’s glued to the news or he has automated news alerts. If he’s set up automated news alerts for United and his other stocks, I’d imagine that he also has automated news alerts for Popflicks because he holds significantly more Popflicks stock than United. If he received an automated news alert on the Popflicks news, he can’t make the case that he didn’t know about the announcement.”

“That’s amazing that you figured that out,” Betty said. “Sebastian will love it. He loves charts and graphs.”

“I will email you a copy to show him.”

“Oh, he’s coming by. He wants to meet you.”

Audrey was surprised. Anderson, the senior partner on the case, was not going to be happy to learn he’d missed a meeting with Sebastian.

“But no printouts of the Popflicks news in his discovery production?” Betty asked.

“No.”

“That would have been too much to hope for. Still, this is good sleuthing.”

Audrey explained the rest of her proposed strategy for the case.