Deckers Outdoor Corporation v. Last Brand, Inc.

Background

Deckers filed a declaration responding to an earlier court order and attached a meet-and-confer letter as an exhibit. The letter contained information that Last Brand, Inc., referred to in the opinion as Quince, had designated confidential and attorneys-eyes-only under the protective order. After Quince asked Deckers to remove the document from the public docket, Deckers filed a redacted version and moved to remove the unredacted version. The court directed Deckers to file an administrative motion addressing whether the document should be sealed.

Deckers stated that it intended to challenge Quince’s confidentiality designation under the protective order. Quince argued that the redacted material should remain sealed because it identified one of Quince’s suppliers and discussed Quince’s supplier relationships, negotiations, agreements, and internal risk-management strategies. Deckers did not respond to Quince’s statement before the response deadline expired.

Legal standard

The court applied the “good cause” standard to documents filed with discovery motions that are only tangentially related to the merits of the case. That standard is less demanding than the “compelling reasons” standard used for documents more closely tied to the merits.

Ruling

The court found good cause to seal the identity of a vendor that was not otherwise public. It sealed the word or words identifying that vendor in two places: between “I just showed you” and “I believe it was” in a deposition-transcript excerpt on page 4 of the letter, and in the corresponding passage near the top of page 5. The court ordered Deckers to redact those two passages from the public version.

The court did not find good cause to seal the other material. It concluded that the remaining passages described, in general terms, a vendor’s assertion about rights to a product design and Quince’s practice of seeking vendor assurances and sometimes consulting outside counsel about potential intellectual-property infringement. The court stated that Quince had not identified harm from disclosing that information. The request to seal anything other than the vendor’s name was therefore denied.

The court ordered Deckers to file a new version of the letter within one week, redacting only the two instances of the vendor’s name. The unredacted versions already sealed on the docket were to remain sealed. The order stated that it resolved docket entries 72 and 82. It also stated that the order did not decide whether the vendor’s identity would qualify for sealing under the more demanding “compelling reasons” standard and did not prevent Deckers from later challenging Quince’s confidentiality designations under the protective order.