Hadley v. Kellogg Sales Company
- Lucy Koh
- 5:16-cv-04955
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 5
Hadley v. Kellogg Sales Company: Judge Koh granted Kellogg’s motion to seal portions of an exhibit containing confidential business information.
Kellogg Sales Company obtained permission to keep specified portions of an exhibit from public access; the ruling also limited public access to those identified pages.
What happened
In Hadley v. Kellogg Sales Company, Kellogg asked to keep portions of an exhibit secret. The exhibit was submitted with motions about class certification, summary judgment, and expert testimony.
The court explained that court records are generally open to the public. Because the exhibit was connected to motions related to the case’s claims, Kellogg had to show compelling reasons for sealing it. Kellogg argued that the exhibit contained proprietary information about competitors’ responses to proposed nutrition-labeling changes and that disclosure could cause competitive harm.
The court found that the exhibit revealed Kellogg’s business strategies and plans for future products, that Kellogg had kept it confidential, and that the request was narrowly limited. Judge Lucy H. Koh granted the motion to seal pages 9, 10, 14, 19, 20, and 21 of the identified document.
The detailed version
- Hadley v. Kellogg Sales Company · No. 5:16-cv-04955
- Lucy Koh
- Dec. 12, 2019
Background
Kellogg Sales Company filed an administrative motion seeking permission to file under seal portions of an exhibit submitted with its motion to decertify the class, motion for summary judgment, and three motions challenging expert testimony. The exhibit was identified as KELLOGG-036087, filed as part of ECF No. 268-2.
Kellogg asserted that the exhibit contained proprietary information about how its competitors had responded to proposed changes in nutrition labeling. It argued that disclosure would cause significant competitive harm.
Legal standard
The court stated that judicial records are generally presumed to be available to the public. For filings more than tangentially related to the underlying claims, a party seeking to seal records must show compelling reasons that outweigh the public’s interest in access. The court explained that compelling reasons can include preventing the disclosure of trade secrets or business information that could harm a litigant’s competitive position.
The court also described a lower good-cause standard for materials unrelated or only tangentially related to the claims. It concluded that the compelling-reasons standard applied here because the exhibit was filed with a summary-judgment motion and related expert motions, and because the court had previously explained that this standard typically applies to class-certification motions.
Court’s analysis and ruling
The court found that the exhibit revealed information about Kellogg’s business strategies and plans for future products. Kellogg represented that it had conducted the relevant research and analysis internally and kept the exhibit confidential. After reviewing the exhibit, the court found that Kellogg’s request was narrowly tailored to information that could plausibly cause competitive harm.
The court therefore granted the administrative motion to file under seal. It granted sealing for KELLOGG-036087, ECF No. 268-2, at pages 9, 10, 14, 19, 20, and 21.
Read the full 5-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.