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 "private business and its executives". 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:
Donald J. DEVINE, Director, Office of Personnel Management, Petitioner, v. Harold C. WHITE, Arbitrator, American Federation of Government Employees, National Border Patrol Council, and Noe Lopez, Respondents.
No. 81-1893.
United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit.
Argued Oct. 18, 1982.
Opinion for the Court Issued Jan. 7, 1983.
Decided July 12, 1983.
Howard S. Scher, Atty., Dept, of Justice, with whom Stanley S. Harris, U.S. Atty., and William Kanter, Atty., Dept, of Justice, Washington, D.C., were on brief, for petitioner.
William Stone, and James R. Rosa and Jane P. Danowitz, Washington, D.C., on brief, for respondents.
Before LUMBARD, Senior Circuit Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, EDWARDS and BORK, Circuit Judges.
Sitting by designation pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 294(d) (Supp. V 1981).
Opinion for the Court PER CURIAM.
PER CURIAM:
This appeal involves an arbitrator’s decision in an “adverse action” case arising under the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. The case is before the court for a second time, and we are again required to review an arbitral judgment — issued pursuant to a contractually established grievance procedure — setting aside a disciplinary sanction imposed by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (“INS”) on one of its agents. The relevant background facts were set forth fully in our first opinion and need not be repeated here.
That first opinion left to the arbitrator the task of determining whether the procedural error he had previously identified was “harmful” within the meaning of 5 U.S.C. § 7701(c)(2)(A) (Supp. V 1981). The INS’s error could be so characterized, we stated, if it either “affected the outcome of the disciplinary proceeding,” or vitiated a substantial right accorded the affected employee by a “clear provision of [the] collective bargaining agreement.” 697 F.2d at 443-44.
On remand, the arbitrator reconsidered and reaffirmed his initial decision setting aside the disciplinary sanction imposed by the INS. Although the arbitrator’s judgment appears not inconsistent with our first decision in this case, it is difficult to fathom any coherent line of reasoning in his long and rambling opinion, which consists almost entirely of random quotes from other sources. In reading his opinion, we are hard-pressed to identify either a glimmer of reasoned consideration, to which we might defer, or a hint that his observations bear any significant relation to the real world.
If government agencies and unions in the federal sector are to bind themselves through collective bargaining agreements to arbitrate disciplinary matters, one would hope that the arbitrators selected — who are given broad authority to construe and enforce labor contracts — have the time, talent and experience to write intelligible opinions. An opinion such as that submitted here forces the court to choose between placing its stamp of approval on utter gibberish or conducting what would amount to de novo review on a hopelessly inadequate record. Both options, of course, are undesirable.
Notwithstanding our dismay over the quality of the arbitral opinion in this case, consistency of the result reached in the arbitrator’s decision with the test established in our original opinion leads us to conclude that approving that result is the lesser of two evils. We therefore affirm the judgment, but not the rationale or opinion, of the arbitrator.
So ordered.
. Pub.L. No. 95-454, 92 Stat. 1111 (codified as amended in scattered sections of 5 U.S.C.).
. The first opinion of the court was issued on January 7, 1983. Devine v. White, 697 F.2d 421 (D.C.Cir.1983).

Question: What is the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "private business and its executives"? Answer with a number.

Choices:

Answer: 0