Nonlitigation Participants is one of the six major roles for participants in the database. These are the individuals that interacted with Lincoln and his partners in legal matters outside of the courts. Editors also identified a number of participant categories that describe only Lincoln’s and his partners’ work related to nonlitigation activities. For example, appraisers may have appeared in legal cases, but their role was not germane to the case. In nonlitigation, Lincoln and his partners may have appraised property for a client, and therefore are identified as such in the participant list for the activity. Unlike cases in litigation, where there may be officers of the court, other attorneys or participants represented in documents have no role in these Lincoln-centered nonlitigation activities and are not included as participants. For example, if Lincoln wrote a deed that a clerk witnessed, only Lincoln and the parties to the deed are participants in the activity. In the appraisal example above, although another appraiser assisted Lincoln and is recognized in the activity name, he is not listed as a participant.
In these examples, the editors accessioned the documents in nonlitigation exactly the same as they would a document in a legal case—document name, date, file date, location, author and signer, etc.—and entered all into the database.