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.
Your specific task is to determine the total number of appellants in the case. 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:
William J. MERTENS; Alex W. Bandrowski; James E. Clarke; Russell Franz, Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. Charles H. BLACK; Gerald G. Ferro; Richard N. Gary; Charles S. Holmes; Patrick J. Hunt; Robert Merrick; George M. Perry; Monty H. Rial; M. Edward Steward; Miles G. Yeagley, Defendants-Appellants, and Kaiser Steel Retirement Plan, Defendant. William J. MERTENS, et al., Plaintiff-Appellee, v. KAISER STEEL RETIREMENT PLAN, et al., Defendant-Appellant. William J. MERTENS, et al., Plaintiff-Appellee, v. PENSION BENEFIT GUARANTY CORPORATION, Defendant-Appellant, and Kaiser Steel Retirement Plan, et al., Defendant.
Nos. 90-16359, 90-16437 and 90-16439.
United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.
Argued and Submitted Aug. 14, 1991.
Decided Nov. 4, 1991.
Julia A. Molander, Bronson, Bronson & McKinnon, San Francisco, Cal., for defendants-appellants.
Jean Marie Breen, Office of Gen. Counsel, Washington, D.C., for Pension Benefit Guar. Corp., defendant-appellant in No. 90-16439 and defendant-appellee in Nos. 90-16359 and 90-16437.
Alfred H. Sigman, Sigman & Lewis, Oakland, Cal., for plaintiffs-appellees.
Before NORRIS and THOMPSON, Circuit Judges, and KING, District Judge.
Hon. Samuel P. King, Senior United States District Court Judge for the District of Hawaii, sitting by designation.
PER CURIAM:
Participants in the Kaiser Steel Retirement Plan (“the Plan”) brought this action to restore to the Plan losses allegedly resulting from breaches of fiduciary duty by members of the Plan’s Investment Committee. Appellants, eleven individual members of the Plan’s Investment Committee, appeal from the district court’s denial of their motion for summary judgment. 744 F.Supp. 917. Appellants contend the prior judgment in Horan v. Kaiser Steel Retirement Plan, on appeal as Koch v. Kaiser Steel Retirement Plan, No. 89-56115 et seq., has preclusive effect here and bars relitigation of the ERISA fiduciary duty issues. We affirm the district court’s denial of the summary judgment motion, although for reasons different from those given by the district court.
Before applying either claim preclusion or issue preclusion, the moving party must demonstrate that the party against whom preclusion is sought was a party to the prior action, or in privity with a party to the prior action. Commissioner v. Sunnen, 333 U.S. 591, 597, 68 S.Ct. 715, 719, 92 L.Ed. 898 (1948) (claim preclusion); United States v. ITT Rayonier, Inc., 627 F.2d 996, 1000 (9th Cir.1980) (claim preclusion); Robi v. Five Platters, Inc., 838 F.2d 318, 326-27 (9th Cir.1988) (issue preclusion). The district court concluded that the plaintiffs in Horan were in privity with the plaintiffs in Mertens because both purported to represent the Plan. See Cramer v. General Tel. & Electronics Corp., 582 F.2d 259, 267 (3d Cir.1978), cert. denied, 439 U.S. 1129, 99 S.Ct. 1048, 59 L.Ed.2d 90 (1979); see also Massachusetts Mutual Life Ins. Co. v. Russell, 473 U.S. 134, 140, 105 S.Ct. 3085, 3089, 87 L.Ed.2d 96 (1985) (suits under ERISA for breach of fiduciary duty must be brought on behalf of the Plan); Sokol v. Bernstein, 803 F.2d 532, 536 (9th Cir.1986) (no right of action under section 409 for “beneficiary qua beneficiary.”).
The district court based its conclusion that the Horan plaintiffs represented the Plan on the premise that under Russell, they could not bring individual claims for individual remedies. Because they could not bring these individual claims, reasoned the district court, the claims they presented must have been asserted on behalf of the Plan.
We reject this analysis. As we held in Koch, (cite), the Horan plaintiffs did not purport to represent the Plan in asserting their claims, nor did they seek a recovery for the Plan. They sought a recovery from the fiduciaries which would provide them with individual annuities. Id.
The only reason suggested as to why we should reclassify the Horan plaintiffs claims into something they plainly are not is that if this is not done, the claims the Horan plaintiffs asserted could not be brought under Russell. We refuse to apply such bootstrap reasoning. In so doing, we reject the appellants’ contention that a fiduciary claim brought on behalf of an individual under ERISA must be classified as if brought on behalf of the Plan.
Because the plaintiffs in Horan did not purport to represent the Plan as a whole, the plaintiffs in Mertens cannot be held to be in privity with the plaintiffs in Horan. Thus, the Mertens plaintiffs cannot be barred from bringing this suit on behalf of the Plan or from relitigating fiduciary breach issues allegedly already litigated dispositively in Horan.
Finally, we hold that the district court did not err in dismissing the Plan as a defendant. Because recovery is sought for the benefit of the Plan, the Plan’s interests are not adverse to those of the plaintiffs. However, we do not read the district court’s dismissal of the Plan as a dismissal of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.
The district court’s denial of the summary judgment motion is AFFIRMED.

Question: What is the total number of appellants in the case? Answer with a number.

Choices:

Answer: 11