In Re GEICO General Insurance Company
- Haywood Gilliam
- 4:19-cv-03768
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 4
In re GEICO General Insurance Co., Judge Gilliam denied motions to seal class-certification materials, requiring public versions and allowing narrower requests.
The parties who sought to seal class-certification materials had to file public versions and could submit narrower sealing requests; the ruling also affected public access to the court records.
What happened
In re GEICO General Insurance Company involved motions by the parties to seal parts of their class-certification briefs and exhibits. The requested material included information about GEICO’s claims practices and a claim document.
The court applied a demanding standard requiring specific, compelling reasons to keep court records secret. It found that several requests were too broad because they covered basic business practices or information already visible to claimants, and therefore did not meet the requirement that sealing requests be narrowly tailored.
Judge Haywood S. Gilliam, Jr. denied the motions to seal. He ordered the parties to file public versions of the documents within seven days, while allowing them to submit new, more specific sealing motions within that period.
The detailed version
- In Re GEICO General Insurance Company · No. 4:19-cv-03768
- Haywood Gilliam
- Feb. 5, 2021
Background
The parties asked to file under seal portions of their class-certification briefs and related exhibits. The court identified five pending motions to seal, filed at Docket Nos. 92, 99, 103, 106, and 110.
Legal standard
Because class certification is more than tangentially related to the underlying action, the court applied the “compelling reasons” standard. Under that standard, a party seeking to seal records attached to a dispositive motion must provide specific factual reasons showing that the need for secrecy outweighs the strong public interest in accessing court records. Civil Local Rule 79-5(b) also requires a sealing request to be narrowly tailored to material that is privileged, a trade secret, or otherwise legally protected.
Court’s analysis
The court found that GEICO sought to seal an unjustifiably broad amount of basic business-practice information. For example, GEICO sought to seal deposition testimony and portions of its opposition brief describing how it handled certain total-loss claims, even though the same practice was disclosed elsewhere in the opposition.
GEICO also sought to seal an entire claim document provided to Plaintiff Subbaiah. The court concluded that the substance of the document described a business practice visible to claimants, as shown by Subbaiah’s complaint allegations concerning the settlement of her claim.
The court held that these and other overly broad requests did not comply with the narrow-tailoring requirement. It emphasized that the parties had the burden to justify, in detail, each fact they sought to seal.
Ruling
Judge Haywood S. Gilliam, Jr. denied the motions to seal. The court directed the parties to file public versions of all documents within seven days of the order. It also allowed the parties to file new motions to seal that complied with the court’s requirements within seven days. Any new proposed order or responsive declaration had to identify, for each item, the relevant public and provisionally sealed docket numbers, the document name, the specific portions sought to be sealed, and specific supporting reasons and authorities. The court stated that it was strongly disinclined to grant future requests resembling the overbroad requests that had resulted in heavily redacted briefs.
Read the full 4-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.