What follows is an opinion from a United States Court of Appeals.
Intervenors who participated as parties at the courts of appeals should be counted as either appellants or respondents when it can be determined whose position they supported. For example, if there were two plaintiffs who lost in district court, appealed, and were joined by four intervenors who also asked the court of appeals to reverse the district court, the number of appellants should be coded as six.
In some cases there is some confusion over who should be listed as the appellant and who as the respondent. This confusion is primarily the result of the presence of multiple docket numbers consolidated into a single appeal that is disposed of by a single opinion. Most frequently, this occurs when there are cross appeals and/or when one litigant sued (or was sued by) multiple litigants that were originally filed in district court as separate actions. The coding rule followed in such cases should be to go strictly by the designation provided in the title of the case. The first person listed in the title as the appellant should be coded as the appellant even if they subsequently appeared in a second docket number as the respondent and regardless of who was characterized as the appellant in the opinion.
To clarify the coding conventions, consider the following hypothetical case in which the US Justice Department sues a labor union to strike down a racially discriminatory seniority system and the corporation (siding with the position of its union) simultaneously sues the government to get an injunction to block enforcement of the relevant civil rights law. From a district court decision that consolidated the two suits and declared the seniority system illegal but refused to impose financial penalties on the union, the corporation appeals and the government and union file cross appeals from the decision in the suit brought by the government. Assume the case was listed in the Federal Reporter as follows:
United States of America,
Plaintiff, Appellant
v
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendant, Appellee.
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendants, Cross-appellants
v
United States of America.
Widgets, Inc. & Susan Kuersten Sheehan, President & Chairman
of the Board
Plaintiff, Appellants,
v
United States of America,
Defendant, Appellee.
This case should be coded as follows:Appellant = United States, Respondents = International Brotherhood of Widget Workers Widgets, Inc., Total number of appellants = 1, Number of appellants that fall into the category "the federal government, its agencies, and officials" = 1, Total number of respondents = 3, Number of respondents that fall into the category "private business and its executives" = 2, Number of respondents that fall into the category "groups and associations" = 1.
Note that if an individual is listed by name, but their appearance in the case is as a government official, then they should be counted as a government rather than as a private person. For example, in the case "Billy Jones & Alfredo Ruiz v Joe Smith" where Smith is a state prisoner who brought a civil rights suit against two of the wardens in the prison (Jones & Ruiz), the following values should be coded: number of appellants that fall into the category "natural persons" =0 and number that fall into the category "state governments, their agencies, and officials" =2. A similar logic should be applied to businesses and associations. Officers of a company or association whose role in the case is as a representative of their company or association should be coded as being a business or association rather than as a natural person. However, employees of a business or a government who are suing their employer should be coded as natural persons. Likewise, employees who are charged with criminal conduct for action that was contrary to the company policies should be considered natural persons.
If the title of a case listed a corporation by name and then listed the names of two individuals that the opinion indicated were top officers of the same corporation as the appellants, then the number of appellants should be coded as three and all three were coded as a business (with the identical detailed code). Similar logic should be applied when government officials or officers of an association were listed by name.
Your specific task is to determine the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "natural persons". If the total number cannot be determined (e.g., if the appellant is listed as "Smith, et. al." and the opinion does not specify who is included in the "et.al."), then answer 99.

Opinion:
Walter M. FREEMAN, Appellant, v. Edward J. BRENNER, Commissioner of Patents, Appellee.
No. 20838.
United States Court of Appeals District of Columbia Circuit.
Argued Nov. 14, 1967.
Decided May 7, 1968.
Mr. Keith Misegades, Washington, D. C., for appellant.
Mr. George C. Roeming, Atty., United States Patent Office, with whom Mr. Joseph Schimmel, Sol., United States Patent Office, was on the brief, for appellee.
Before Wilbur K. Miller, Senior Circuit Judge, and Burger and McGowan, Circuit Judges.
PER CURIAM:
Appellant, dissatisfied with appellee’s disallowance of a patent application filed in 1963, brought suit in the District Court under 35 U.S.C. § 145. After the trial de novo permitted by that statute, the District Court, 261 F.Supp. 286, stating its reasons at length upon the record, refused to interfere with the action of the Patent Office. We, in turn, leave the judgment of the District Court undisturbed. -
The issue is the familiar one of whether, within the meaning of 35 U.S.C. § 103, “ * * * the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art * * The claimed invention related to a parabolically-shaped bifocal lens, designed to provide enlarged and improved peripheral vision to cataract patients. The examiner and the Board of Appeals at the Patent Office concurred in believing that prior patents disclosed (1) lenses made of fused materials in such manner as to have a one-piece spherical surface embracing both near and distant vision, and (2) the enlargement of the plane of vision incident to a paraboloidal, as distinct from a spherical, lens surface. It was concluded that knowledge of these patents, with which appellant must be charged in law, rendered obvious the combination of their teachings effected in appellant’s claims.
The trial de novo in the District Court consisted of the introduction of the Patent Office record, the testimony of appellant on direct examination, and the arguments of counsel. Appellant was afforded a full opportunity to explain why his claimed invention represented something more than a mere recognition of the potentialities in combination of the earlier discoveries, and why the Patent Office disallowance was insupportable. The District Court pursued the intricacies of this effort with close and careful attention and, after due reflection, set forth in detail the reasons why it was unpersuaded, of Patent Office irrationality requiring judicial correction. It referred in particular to the recent efforts of this court to delineate the standards by which the Patent Office’s judgments on the issue of obviousness are to be appraised. Stieg v. Commissioner of Patents, 122 U.S.App.D.C. 361, 353 F.2d 899 (1965); and see Zenith Radio Corp. v. Ladd, 114 U.S.App.D.C. 54, 310 F.2d 859 (1962). Those standards do not appear to us to have been affected by the Supreme Court’s subsequent consideration of the scope and meaning of Section 103 in Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1, 86 S.Ct. 684, 15 L.Ed.2d 545 (1966), upon which appellant has chiefly relied. Applying those standards to the record before us, we cannot say the District Court erred in concluding, in the language of Stieg, that “the new evidence taken on the trial de novo did not bring to [it] ‘thorough conviction’ that the judgment of the Patent Office was invalid * *
In any event, the District Court was at pains to make clear that, even under a vastly broader scope of review than that heretofore contemplated by this court, it would still Have reached the same result; and we cannot say that, upon the evidence adduced before it, this view of the merits was unfounded.
The judgment of the District Court is
Affirmed.
. This application purported to be a continuation of an application filed in 1957. The latter was rejected by the Patent Office as unpatentable because of obviousness. In the District Court the appellee raised the issue of res judicata, contending that the denial of the first application foreclosed the claims made in the second. The District Court did not find it necessary to reach this issue.
. See Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1, 36, 86 S.Ct. 684, 15 L.Ed.2d 545 (1966); Walker v. General Motors Corp., 362 F.2d 56, 60 n. 3 (9th Cir. 1966); Griffith Rubber Mills v. Hoffar, 313 F. 2d 1, 3 (9th Cir. 1963).

Question: What is the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "natural persons"? Answer with a number.

Choices:

Answer: 0