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 Company: Judge Gilliam denied GEICO’s sealing motion and directed public filings within seven days.
GEICO, the parties submitting the class-certification materials, and the public’s access to the court docket.
What happened
In In re GEICO General Insurance Company, GEICO asked to keep parts of class-certification briefs and exhibits from public view, claiming they revealed confidential business practices about sales-tax calculations and payments for leased-vehicle total-loss claims in California.
The court found that GEICO’s requests were too broad and inconsistent. Some requested material repeated information already publicly available or described elsewhere in the filings. The court denied the motion, directed GEICO to file public versions within seven days, and allowed GEICO to submit a new, properly tailored sealing motion within that period.
Judge Haywood S. Gilliam, Jr. applied the standard requiring compelling reasons to seal judicial records and concluded that GEICO had not justified sealing each specific portion it identified.
The detailed version
- In Re GEICO General Insurance Company · No. 4:19-cv-03768
- Haywood Gilliam
- Apr. 23, 2021
Background
The Defendant moved to file under seal portions of the parties’ class-certification briefs and related exhibits. GEICO said the material disclosed confidential and proprietary business practices concerning the calculation and payment of sales tax in California leased-vehicle total-loss claims.
Legal standard
The court explained that judicial records generally are subject to a strong presumption of public access. Because class-certification briefing is more than tangentially related to the underlying claims, the court applied the “compelling reasons” standard. Under that standard, the party seeking to seal records must identify specific reasons that outweigh the public’s interest in access. Civil Local Rule 79-5 also requires a request to be narrowly tailored to material that is privileged, a trade secret, or otherwise legally protected.
Court’s analysis
The court denied the motion because GEICO again failed to tailor its requests narrowly enough. As one example, GEICO sought to seal a portion of Plaintiffs’ reply that quoted a claim document. The court had previously rejected sealing the entire document because it reflected a business practice visible to claimants, and an unredacted version had since been filed publicly.
As another example, GEICO sought to seal a portion of a footnote discussing a change to its claim system even though the same change was described elsewhere in the reply and cited the same deposition excerpts. The court found that these inconsistencies showed that GEICO had not limited its requests to material directly referring to the claimed confidential information. The court emphasized that GEICO bore the burden of justifying, in detail, each fact it sought to seal.
Disposition
Judge Haywood S. Gilliam, Jr. denied the motion to seal. The court directed the Defendant to file public versions of all documents within seven days. The Defendant could also file a new motion to seal within seven days that followed the court’s requirements. Any proposed order had to identify, for each item, the public and provisionally sealed docket numbers, the document name, the specific material sought to be sealed, and specific supporting reasons with citations to declarations and legal authority.
Read the full 4-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.