42 West LLC v. Gould
- Ona Wang
- 1:21-cv-01581
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 2
In 42 West LLC v. Gould, Judge Wang denied 42 West’s motion to seal counsel’s billing rates in the default-judgment opinion.
42 West LLC and its counsel, whose requested billing-rate redactions were denied; the requested references were not sealed under this order.
What happened
In 42 West LLC v. Gould, 42 West LLC asked the court to redact two references to the hourly rates of attorneys and staff at its law firm from an opinion entering default judgment.
42 West argued that the rates were competitively sensitive, had previously been kept from public view, and were not important to the court’s ruling.
Judge Wang denied the motion, explaining that courts regularly discuss billing rates in public records when deciding awards of attorney fees.
The detailed version
- 42 West LLC v. Gould · No. 1:21-cv-01581
- Ona Wang
- Oct. 28, 2024
Background
42 West LLC moved to partially seal the court’s opinion and order entering default judgment. It sought to redact only two references to the hourly billing rates for attorneys and staff members at Calcagni & Kanefsky LLP, the law firm representing 42 West.
42 West argued that the billing rates were competitively sensitive, had not previously been available to the public on the court’s electronic docket, and were not particularly important to the court’s ruling. The motion relied on the presumption of public access to judicial documents and argued that the privacy interests connected to the firm’s billing rates outweighed the public’s interest in seeing them.
Ruling
The court denied 42 West LLC’s motion to seal. Judge Ona T. Wang stated that courts regularly discuss billing rates in the public record when determining awards of attorney fees and cited several decisions from the Southern District of New York. The order therefore did not grant the requested redactions.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.