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:
Frances P. NORMAN and Frances P. Norman d/b/a The Norman Company, a partnership consisting of Frances P. Norman and Norman Norman, Appellees, v. Leonard LAWRENCE, Appellant.
No. 66, Docket 26043.
United States Court of Appeals Second Circuit.
Argued Nov. 1, 1960.
Decided Dec. 21, 1960.
Swan, Circuit Judge, dissented.
Mock & Blum, Blum, Moscovitz, Friedman & Blum, Alex Friedman, New York City, for defendant-appellant.
Kenyon & Kenyon, Ralph L. Chappell, Richard A. Huettner, New York City, for plaintiffs-appellees.
Before HAND, SWAN and MEDINA, Circuit Judges.
HAND, Circuit Judge.
This is an appeal from a judgment of Judge Bruchhausen (180 F.Supp. 186), holding valid and infringed Claim 1 of Patent No. 2,763,999, issued to one of the plaintiffs, Frances P. Norman, for “earring pads.” The disclosure was for two kinds of “pads” — the “clip-on” and the “screw-on — but we need concern ourselves only with the “clip-on” type. It was designed to provide a “clip” that would grasp an earring to the lobe of the ear and hold it firmly in place to resist entanglements in the hair, but without too much pressure on the lobe for the comfort of the wearer. There had been numerous earring “clips” before, at times using round sections of a soft rubber cylinder, and holding their position by adhesives on one or both of the two arms of a spring pressed clamp. We accept, because they are not shown to be “clearly erroneous” Judge Bruchhausen’s findings of fact as follows. “The articles on the market prior to the introduction of plaintiffs’ article were so-called stick-on pads, supposed to remain glued onto the rear of the earring clamp upon application of finger pressure. However, these pads would continually loosen and become caught in a user’s hair. Also, on the market was a tubular rubber cot or sleeve for twisting on to the rear of the earring. The cot or sleeve was found unsatisfactory because the rubber cots or sleeves were difficult to twist on to the earring clamp and, since the clamps were not strong, would frequently break. The plaintiff, Frances P. Norman, then experimented and eventually developed her article, a flat flexible thin rubber pocket created by the dipping of two flat thin rubber pieces into a latex solution, holding the pocket intact and rendering it extremely flexible. It also developed that a sponge rubber pad could be retained on the fiat side of the rubber pocket, which would not slip off or loosen from the pocket.”
The pads themselves were very old, but were not satisfactory for the reasons just given. The other element of the combination, the rubber “pocket” just mentioned, known as the Dorsey “boot,” had appeared thirty years before the application for the patent; it was made up of sections of a rubber tubing to be slipped over one of the clamps, quite unlike the patented circular discs of rubber about the size of the clamp on which they were to be used. Two of these were stuck together at their circumferences except for an opening between them long enough to admit the inner clamp by stretching. The plaintiffs sold their “pockets” with a pad already glued on; in the accused clip the pads and “pockets” were sold separately with instruction that a pad should be glued to the inner “pocket.” The invention therefore consisted of combining a kind of “pocket” that could be easily slipped on and off the clamp, with the old pad into a single member that would hold the earring in place upon the lobe of the wearer’s ear.
In spite of the fact that this combination was of the simplest sort, made of two elements that had for many years been used in the industry, no one had thought of combining them. Hence it is argued, as it always is when an invention consists of a combination of old elements, that there can be no “invention” in mere “aggregation.” In the case at bar the judge has found that “the commercial success was phenomenal, and again there is no reason to hold that this finding was “clearly erroneous.” The appeal therefore presents the question that so often arises as to patents: what shall be the test or standard of invention? We have just discussed this once again in the case of Reiner v. I. Leon & Co., 285 F.2d 501, handed down at the same time as this, and could only repeat what we there said. It is true that courts have again and again evinced repugnance to recognizing as patentable a trivial readjustment of existing elements into a new combination, apparently insisting that monopolies should be limited to new assemblages of old elements that are important and imposing. That disposition will no doubt continue; it is hard to attach value to a trifling modification of a gadget that has arisen on the surface of a stream of novelties because it has found immediate favor. We can only reply that, while the standard remains what it is, we can see no escape from measuring invention in cases-where all the elements of the new combination had been long available, (1) by whether the need had long existed and been desired, and (2) whether, when it. was eventually contrived, it was widely exploited as a substitute for what had. gone before.
Judgment affirmed.

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

Choices:

Answer: 1