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Depositories: The Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository contains in excess of 35 million pages of material discovered in the course of the State of Minnesota and Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Minnesota’s litigation against the tobacco industry. The depository also contains copies of discovery material from all subsequent tobacco litigation in the United States. It is open to the public, independently managed under court supervision pursuant to settlement terms, and offers copying and CD-ROM creation services. It does not include documents produced by the world’s second largest tobacco company, British American Tobacco (BAT). The Depository is located at:
A catalog of materials located in the Minnesota Depository is available on the Internet site of the Minnesota plaintiff’s firm of Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi L.L.P at: British American Tobacco (BAT) operates its own depository where the public may view and request copies of materials produced in the course of the Minnesota litigation. It is located in Guildford, near London, England. Access to the Guildford Depository is by appointment only and subject to a number of restrictions and conditions imposed by BAT. To access the depository, contact:
Mr. Martyn Gilbey 1) The tobacco companies, with the exception of British America Tobacco, operate their own document sites on the Internet. These sites consist of pictures of scanned pages of tobacco documents. The scanned documents themselves, in many cases, are difficult to read. Downloading images, as opposed to text, is very slow. Significant research will takes weeks, not days. Most sites require users to have a web browser plug-in, companion software for document viewing, that can be downloaded at no charge. Theoretically, when these sites are complete, they will contain much of what is physically located at the Minnesota Depository. This is a requirement of the Master Settlement Agreement between the states and the tobacco companies. The ability to search for specific documents, however, is very limited. For a higher degree of certainty, knowledge of the document’s bates number is required. All of the industry sites are linked to the industry Internet site located at: 2) Brown & Williamson paralegal Merrell Williams compiled the first collection of documents available to the public. It has been scanned and meticulously indexed with abstracts and analysis by Professor Stanton Glantz and his colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco. This collection, as well as an outstanding collection of documents discovered in litigation challenging the Joe Camel advertising campaign are available at:
7) Exhibits from the only other state case against the industry to go to trial are available from the Washington Attorney General’s Office at: 8) Two fine collections of valuable quotes from tobacco documents have been compiled. One, by ASH UK, Tobacco Explained, is at Tobacco BBS, a tobacco news web site hosts the other at: 9) For coverage of tobacco litigation including recent opinions and the status of cases, please refer to: 10) To search the document index like the one used by the Minnesota Depository as well as the index to the BAT documents at Guildford, England, try the CDC’s document web site at: |