Mastro's testimony implicated two of four defendants charged with fraud that led to the 2002 collapse of the high-flying software company: Patrick J. Towle, a Peregrine revenue accounting manager; and Daniel F. Stulac, the former Arthur Andersen partner who headed the company's team of outside auditors.
Under questioning by Stulac's defense lawyer, Michael Attanasio, Mastro denied that she was trying to protect Matt Gless, Peregrine's former chief financial officer. Mastro testified her relationship with the CFO did not become intimate until months after both had left Peregrine.
In the courtroom, though, Burk, a private consultant, searched her computer database of more than 1 million electronic documents the defense team had compiled, yielding several love-struck e-mails Mastro and Gless had exchanged months before they exited the company. In one e-mail that begins, "Thanks again for making my Valentine special," Mastro asked, "What could be better than getting high on wine, dope and love in one night?"
And what could be worse as a witness than being confronted - and contradicted - by your own e-mails, projected onto a screen in a federal courtroom?
To organize the flood of data in complex cases, trial lawyers are turning increasingly to consultants such as Burk, a longtime paralegal, and her partner, Shayne Davidson, a technology specialist.
VideoTrack, the small business they started about 15 years ago, provides a variety of technical services that enable lawyers to organize electronic evidence into databases, make computer-aided presentations at trial, videotape pretrial interviews and practice their arguments in a mock courtroom.
Underlying the evidence presented during the Peregrine trial were more than 10 million e-mails and other electronic documents the government generated during its investigation.
By today's standards, "that's a medium-sized case," said George Socha, a Minnesota legal consultant who specializes in electronic data discovery, a burgeoning area of the law.
"In these massive document cases, the party that does not have its documents scanned and organized is at a tremendous disadvantage," said Robert Grimes, a San Diego defense lawyer who wrote a blog about developments in the Peregrine trial.
The tricky part, as Socha put it, is that "no jury in the world wants to see more than 20 to 50 documents. Their eyes will glaze over."
Attanasio, a partner in the San Diego office of the Cooley Godward Kronish law firm, agreed.
"To have a very robust document management system in court that is searchable in real time is critical," he said.
But Attanasio also cautioned that doing document data searches on the fly is no substitute for spending hours of work in advance of the trial, searching for the pertinent documents that will be needed at trial.
Los Angeles lawyer Greg Emerson said VideoTrack's help was crucial last year in a civil lawsuit filed by the widow of murdered Oceanside, Calif., police Officer Tony Zeppetella against the manufacturers of his bullet-resistant vest.
A simulated trial held in VideoTrack's mock courtroom also helped persuade one of Rich Williams' clients to settle a lawsuit he filed against the city of San Diego over a traffic accident.
"It provided my client an opportunity to listen to nine jurors talk freely about him while he's sitting behind a mirrored glass," said Williams, a San Diego trial lawyer who handles personal injury cases. "The jurors were saying, 'This guy has some serious credibility problems.'"
In 2006, VideoTrack joined with nine similar trial support firms in Boston, New York and other U.S. cities to form CausaFirma, a national network to establish standardized technical support services for trial lawyers. Burk estimated the firms' annual revenue ranges from $500,000 to several million dollars.
VideoTrack, with two employees, falls toward the low end of the range.
Similar businesses that compete to provide electronic litigation support include San Diego-based ALJ Litigation Media and Fulcrum Legal Graphics of San Francisco.
VideoTrack started by doing mostly videotaped depositions, said Davidson, referring to the formal pretrial witness interviews. In the early years, attorneys viewed the videotape recordings mostly as a way to preserve testimony if something happened to witnesses in a case.
At that time, Davidson said, "It was very difficult to use video clips in trial, to find that one little quote that the lawyers wanted."
With the introduction of trial presentation software in 1999, consultants like Davidson can synchronize digitally recorded video testimony with transcripts. The software enables Davidson to create data files that are searchable by key words, making it far easier to create video clips that can be used in court.
VideoTrack's fees for such work can range from $500 to more than $1,200 per witness, depending on how long the deposition lasts and additional technical services.
Williams and other lawyers say it's worthwhile because witnesses are less prepared in pretrial interviews. They speak differently and more candidly than they do in a courtroom before 12 jurors and a judge.
Trial lawyers said replaying such videotaped testimony to rebut a witness' courtroom testimony can be devastating.
