First Year 2000 Class Action Filed

[QQ]By David M. Nadler and Kendrick C. Fong

As the Year 2000 approaches, industry analysts and experts predict that beleaguered businesses and disgruntled shareholders will bombard the courts with lawsuits concerning the "Millennium Bug" and whether products and internal systems are Year 2000 compliant. The "Millennium Bug," or Year 2000 problem, is a programming judgment error in many older computer languages, such as COBOL. Because two-digit date fields were used instead of four-digit date fields to conserve valuable and expensive memory space, dates beyond 1999 may not be processed correctly, which can result in systems failure and data corruption, among other things.

The first class action lawsuit, Atlaz International v. Software Business Technologies, Inc., was filed in December 1997 in California state court. A class action lawsuit is one in which an individual plaintiff seeks to represent the interests of many other similarly situated persons or companies, such as all