In a commercial dispute, documents generated before, during and after a transaction usually tell the most accurate story of the events involved. In addition, documents are created before any of the participants have the motive lie about such events. Thus, in any commercial dispute, documents are extremely important to everyone and your attorney needs to review, analyze and present such documents to jury or judge. Lets look at the basic types of documents that are usually involved in a commercial dispute.

First, the vast majority of commercial disputes involve a basic agreement. A basic agreement could be a one hundred page commercial space lease to a single page invoice. In any commercial dispute, the attorney carefully reviews the basic agreement or agreements to understand the obligations between the parties.

Second, often times, a commercial dispute involves a disagreement of the meaning of a paragraph, sentence or phrase in an agreement. In such a dispute, the attorney will attempt to obtain and review all notes and memoranda of the negotiators of the agreement so that the attorney can determine if such documents contain any clarification of the meaning of the paragraph, sentence or phrase that is being disputed.

Third, often times, a person was defrauded by representations and promises that are not contained in the basic agreement. Such fraud is where someone is induced to enter into an agreement because of representations and promises that were made outside of the agreement. In such a dispute, the attorney will attempt to obtain and review every document concerning the real property purchased, the business purchased, etc.

In cases of fraud, the person who committed the fraud will not admit to the fraud. As such, documents are often a record to the representations and promises that were used to commit fraud. Also, documents often contain a record that the person making such representations and promise knew that the representations were false or the person had no intent to fulfill the promise.
Fourth, sometimes, a party ìlosesî or destroy his or her documents. In fraud cases, more documents are ìlostî than any other type of commercial cases. In such a situation, an attorney can obtain documents from third-party sources. In a number of fraud cases, I have been confronted with a defendant who ìthrew everything awayî.
In one such case, we obtained documents from over thirty (30) different sources to prove that this defendant committed fraud upon our client . As a simple example, a defendant loses a very damaging letter, however, the defendant gave the damaging letter to someone in a meeting and you get a copy of the letter from that person.

Fourth, documents are presented in a trial along with witness testimony to provide a more accurate story of the true events. Also, documents are used to confront a witness who has ìchanged his storyî from what that witness wrote down during the transaction in those documents. In many cases, the truth becomes absolutely clear when a witness has to acknowledge that the written document is accurate and his memory is not.

This a very short overview of the importance of documents in commercial disputes. In any important transaction, keep your documents in order and in a safe place because you may need them to tell the story.

By: Glenn K. Sato 1/98