Dental Monitoring SAS v. Align Technology, Inc.

Background

This order addressed the remaining motions to seal and supporting declarations concerning filings in the parties’ patent dispute. The requests involved materials related to Dental Monitoring’s and Align’s partial summary-judgment motions, related opposition and reply filings, hearing slides, Align’s motion to strike doctrine-of-equivalents contentions, and Dental Monitoring’s claim-construction filings.

Dental Monitoring did not request redactions for some material and did not file declarations supporting redactions for material attributed to it in certain filings. Align’s initial sealing motions had been denied across the board. Align then filed a superseding motion seeking fewer redactions and withdrew some earlier requests. The court evaluated the narrowed requests and other remaining requests in connection with the underlying filings.

Legal standard

The court emphasized the strong public policy favoring open court records. Materials more than tangentially related to the merits may be sealed only for “compelling reasons,” while materials only tangentially related to the merits may be sealed for “good cause.” The party seeking secrecy bears the burden of overcoming the presumption of public access.

The court also required sealing requests to be narrowly tailored. A party must identify each document or passage, explain the private or public interests supporting secrecy, describe the injury that would result from disclosure, explain why a less restrictive alternative would not work, and provide evidence when necessary. The court recognized that redaction may protect trade secrets and business information that could harm a litigant’s competitive position, but rejected vague or boilerplate claims of potential harm.

Rulings

The court granted in part and denied in part the requests concerning Dental Monitoring’s motion for partial summary judgment. It granted redactions for certain commercially sensitive technical details, including detailed descriptions of software operation, function calls, filenames, and technical documents that operated like how-to manuals. It denied redactions for high-level descriptions of Align’s service model, value proposition, patient steps, general software functions, high-level technical explanations, and a three-year-old first page of a software-development plan. It also granted in part and denied in part requests involving excerpts from an expert report and deposition testimony when some passages contained protectable technical details but others did not.

The court granted in part and denied in part requests concerning Align’s opposition to Dental Monitoring’s summary-judgment motion. It denied redactions for generic or high-level descriptions but granted redactions for more specific commercially sensitive details, including filenames, function variables, and descriptions of how code worked. It granted requests covering software file and function names in another deposition excerpt.

The court granted in part and denied in part requests concerning Dental Monitoring’s reply. It denied redactions for a high-level description of Align’s software and granted redactions for filenames and excerpts of documents for which protection had already been allowed. It granted redactions in an expert deposition transcript and denied the request to seal an entire one-page excerpt that contained only high-level results.

For Dental Monitoring’s hearing slides, the court granted redactions on slides 35, 36, 46, and 48 because they reproduced material for which redactions had been allowed elsewhere. It granted in part and denied in part the request involving slides 48, 51, and 55, allowing protection for slide 48 but denying protection for slides 51 and 55 because they reproduced material previously found not to warrant redaction.

The court granted the request to redact filenames in excerpts submitted with Align’s motion to strike because disclosure could create commercial risks without improving public understanding of the case.

The court granted in part and denied in part the request concerning Dental Monitoring’s claim-construction brief and an expert-report excerpt. It denied redaction of one passage and granted redaction of the remaining material for the reasons stated elsewhere in the order. A later motion concerning Dental Monitoring’s reply was mooted when Align released an unredacted copy.

Disposition

The court concluded that the motions to seal were granted in part and denied in part. Proposed redactions that had been withdrawn or were not otherwise expressly addressed were denied as moot. The parties were ordered to refile all documents in accordance with the order by noon on September 6, 2024.