The Pre-Trial Review, the ‘Additional Documents’ & the application to adjourn
At the PTR, Dr Wright applied to rely on the ‘Additional Documents’ and to adjourn the Joint Trial, which was then due to commence on 15th January 2024 with one day of opening submissions followed by 4 days of my pre-reading before commencing the evidence the following week.
In their submissions at the PTR, Dr Wright’s Counsel placed great emphasis on the importance of the ‘Additional Documents’. For present purposes I can deal with two categories of the Additional Documents:
First, Dr Wright had identified 97 documents which were a selection of documents taken from two USB drives which Dr Wright said he had discovered in a drawer at his house on 15 September 2023. One of the drives, termed the Samsung USB drive, was said to contain an image of a drive which Dr Wright had used when he worked at BDO from 2004-end 2008 – the BDO Drive. This image was said to be a snapshot dating from 31st October 2007. The significance of that date was clear – if the image did date from 31st October 2007, then 95 of the 97 documents pre-dated either the publication of the Bitcoin White Paper or the release of the Bitcoin Source Code.
The second category of documents were certain LaTeX documents stored by Dr Wright in an online Overleaf account.
The evidence in support of the application was a witness statement of Ms Hannah Field (“Ms Field”), the partner in charge of Dr Wright’s case at his (then relatively newly instructed) solicitors, Shoosmiths LLP, but in his sixth witness statement, Dr Wright confirmed the content of her witness statement as true. In relation to the two categories of Additional Documents, her evidence was as follows:
Ms Field reported that Dr Wright had told her that he had not edited or amended any documents in the BDO Drive since 31st October 2007. She continued: ‘If that is correct, then the 95 documents are at least very strong evidence that Dr Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, as is clear from their nature and contents.’ She set out in Schedule 1 to her statement an explanation of the relevance of these documents based on information provided by Dr Wright which ‘proceeds on the basis that the documents in the BDO Image were not modified since 31 October 2007’. She made one qualification: she referred to a Stroz Friedberg (‘SF’) memorandum and related, as in Wright5, that there were a number of data points identified by SF which required further investigation. Dr Wright accepted these points would need to be analysed by the parties’ forensic experts when considering the provenance of the hard drives.
As regards the LaTeX documents, Ms Field related two key pieces of evidence from Dr Wright. In summary, these were that:
The relevant LaTeX files were said to be unique, such that (so it was said) mere possession of them is evidence of authorship of the White Paper.
It is practically infeasible to reverse engineer the LaTeX Code from the published Bitcoin White Paper (for two reasons which she set out).
And she concluded:
‘34. The White Paper LaTeX Files are therefore of the highest possible importance for the trial of the Identity Issue, and that issue cannot fairly be determined unless Dr Wright is entitled to rely on these documents and have his case on the significance of these documents addressed in expert evidence.’
Notwithstanding the serious criticisms made by COPA in their correspondence and evidence served for the PTR {Sherrell18 and Madden3}, I was persuaded to admit the Additional Documents. On the evidence of Ms Field and Dr Wright, I could not see how a fair trial of the Identity Issue could take place without those documents being considered.
The other part of Dr Wright’s application was to adjourn the trial to come back in April 2024. Enquiries revealed that it could not come back in April 2024 and a full adjournment would be likely to lead to the Joint Trial being delayed by about a year. In those circumstances, I investigated the possibility of delaying the start of the trial to enable analysis of and evidence relating to the Additional Documents to be prepared and filed, and for Dr Wright’s reply evidence to be completed. In the result, I ordered the commencement of the Joint Trial to be delayed until 5th February 2024, with my pre-reading in the preceding week. This put pressure on both sides in terms of the additional preparation required, but my expectation that they could be ready for that delayed trial date proved to be correct, and I am very grateful for all the hard work which was done to enable the Joint Trial to go ahead.
In view of the Additional Documents, I considered it right, in my PTR Judgment, to limit COPA’s existing allegations of forgery to the 20 documents listed in the Schedule appended to Bird & Bird’s Third Letter of 14 December 2023. I proposed that COPA should be permitted to add a maximum of 20 further allegations of forgery relating to the Additional Documents. These were pleaded in the Claimant’s Schedule of Further Forgeries dated 23 January 2024. As I shall relate, there was a yet further Schedule served by the Claimants on 28 February 2024 of Dr Wright’s Forgery during Trial.
In my PTR Order, I also ordered Dr Wright to provide Mr Madden with a forensic image of the Samsung Drive, containing a forensic image of the BDO Drive. The content of these forensic images turned out to be important.
Following the PTR, the parties exchanged reply evidence. They served further reports from experts in forensic documents examination and LaTeX software {Madden4 {G/6/1} and Rosendahl1 {G/7/1} for COPA; Lynch1 {I/5/1} and Placks2 {I/6/1} for Dr Wright}. The experts produced Joint Statements, reaching near complete agreement.
On Day 1 of trial (5 February 2024), I permitted Dr Wright to rely upon a number of further additional documents which had been referenced in and/or deployed with Wright11. As a result, and with the permission of the Court, COPA served a further report from Mr Madden – Madden5.
During trial, COPA also served a second report of Prof. Meiklejohn answering some points Dr Wright had made in cross-examination relevant to the signing sessions, and (in relation to the Overleaf metadata) a further report from Mr Rosendahl. These were admitted into evidence by agreement.
On 29 February 2024, COPA served on Dr Wright the further Schedule of Forgery During Trial as well as Madden6 dealing with the forged MYOB Ontier Email. The former was agreed as a pleading amendment and deemed annexed to the Particulars of Claim, while the latter was admitted into evidence by agreement.
The final point to make regarding the procedural history is that no complaint was made that any of the parties were not ready to start the Trial on the adjourned date of 5 February 2024.
To the extent that Dr Wright might be tempted to complain about the somewhat unusual procedural history of this claim and the compression of the timetable as the start of Trial approached, it may be noted that both those attributes were very largely his responsibility, both in terms of his late and very late disclosure and (in line with my findings in the Appendix) the very extensive scale of his forgery.