Accumenics

Accumenics, Inc., a maker of litigation-support software, was acquired by Hadron, the company controlled by Earl Brian, together with SIMCON Inc., a police-software firm. In the telephone call of April 1983 that Bill Hamilton attributed to Hadron's chairman Dominic Laiti, the purchases were explained as part of a strategy "to become the leading vendor in the United States of software for law enforcement and courts," the ambition behind Laiti's offer to buy INSLAW and its PROMIS software.¹

Hamilton's affidavit in the INSLAW litigation alleged that James L. Byrnes, a deputy assistant attorney general with "close ties to Meese," "spearheaded the award by DOJ in October 1987 to a Hadron subsidiary of a 40 million dollar computer services contract for litigation support" in the Land and Natural Resources Division. Byrnes told the investigators of the special counsel Nicholas J. Bua that he had transferred to that division in November 1987, a month after the alleged award, that he was unaware of any such contract and did not know whether one had ever been made, that he had no knowledge of or contact with Hadron, Simeon or Accumenics, and that his relationship with Meese was the ordinary one of a Department of Justice official. Bua's report treats the dollar figure and date as unconfirmed and the Byrnes connection as unsupported. The contract is distinct from Project Eagle, the department's litigation-automation program whose 30-million-dollar systems contract went to Tisoft, Inc., in January 1986, and which INSLAW separately theorized had been intended for Hadron.¹