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:
ABERCROMBIE v. COE, Commissioner of Patents.
No. 7655.
United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Argued March 19, 1941.
Decided April 14, 1941.
Lester B. Clark, of Houston, Tex. (Emmett L. Sheehan, of Washington, D. C., on the brief), for appellant.
Edwin L. Reynolds, of Washington, D. C. (William Wallace Cochran, Sol., United States Patent Office, of Washington, D. C., on the brief), for appellee.
Before GRONER, Chief Justice, and EDGERTON and RUTLEDGE, Associate Justices.
EDGERTON, Associate Justice.
This is a suit i to obtain a patent. The Patent Office and the District Court held that the claims lack invention.
The claimed device is a blowout preven-ter, with rams and pistons, for sealing the head of an oil well by closing the space between the drill pipe and the well casing. For this purpose appellant uses three independent sources of power; well pressure, independent fluid pressure, and a manually operated screw. Abercrombie patent 1,834,922 uses, in a blowout preventer, fluid pressure and a manually operated screw; similarly, Rasmussen patent 1,709,949 uses well pressure and independent fluid pressure. Appellant’s use of all three of these previously-used sources of power is not inventive. Claims which call for the admission of both fluid pressures behind the rams as well as behind the pistons have been allowed and are not involved in this appeal.
Appellant claims a packing with oppositely-flared resilient lips, which is practically identical with King patent 2,081,040. Though the King claims do not mention blowout preventers, the King specification states that the packing “will withstand enormous pressures” and points out that one of the accompanying drawings shows the packing “in position on a pump piston which piston may be of the type used in the blowout preventer or slush pumps in the drilling of wells.” The King specification also states that “the combination of the present type packing with a blowout pre-venter is claimed in my simultaneously filed copending application Serial No. 617,837 for a Blowout preventer.” No. 617,837 has been assigned by King to appellant, and is the application now on appeal. Use of the King packing in appellant’s blowout pre-venter is not inventive. The granting of the appealed claims would involve double patenting, with consequent prolongation of the patent monopoly.
Affirmed.
Under R.S. Sec. 4915, U.S.C.A. Tit. 35, Sec. 63.

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: 1