LeGrand v. Abbott Laboratories

Background

This putative class action concerns Abbott’s advertising and sale of Ensure-branded nutrition drinks. LeGrand alleges that Abbott’s statements suggest the drinks are balanced, nutritious, and healthy even though they contain harmful levels of sugar.

The parties had a stipulated protective order allowing information to be marked “CONFIDENTIAL” or “HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL.” The order defined confidential information as material qualifying for protection under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(c). It defined highly confidential information as extremely sensitive confidential material whose disclosure to a nonparty could create a substantial risk of serious harm that less restrictive measures could not avoid.

Abbott produced six groups of documents concerning the research and analysis used to support claims about Ensure products’ efficacy, safety, tolerability, and use. Abbott designated the documents “Highly Confidential.” LeGrand challenged most of those designations. After the parties could not resolve the dispute, Abbott moved to retain confidentiality.

Legal Standard

Under Rule 26(c), a court may protect discovery materials for good cause, including confidential commercial information. The party seeking protection must show specific harm from disclosure for each document or portion of a document. The court then balances the private interest in confidentiality against the public interest in disclosure and considers whether redaction could permit disclosure of non-harmful material.

This was a motion concerning confidentiality designations for discovery materials, not a motion to seal documents filed with the court. The court therefore applied the good-cause standard for discovery protection rather than the separate standard governing public court filings.

Court’s Analysis

The court found that Abbott sufficiently identified a particularized competitive harm for portions of the documents. Abbott represented that its employees and subject-matter experts had spent weeks evaluating the claims used in its labels and promotional materials. The court concluded that releasing the resulting research and analysis could allow competitors to use Abbott’s work to make similar claims for their own products.

The court rejected LeGrand’s arguments that the harm was speculative because Abbott had not initially identified competitors, that the underlying articles and regulatory materials were publicly available, and that some of the information was several years old. The court found that Abbott’s compilation and application of public information could still provide a competitive advantage, and it accepted Abbott’s representation that the analysis remained relevant to current products and claims.

The court did not find specific harm for every page. LeGrand identified pages containing only employee names, nutritional labels, or product claims without details about the research or analysis supporting them. Abbott did not address that argument, and the court agreed that its finding of competitive harm did not cover the entirety of the documents. The order therefore protected particular Bates-numbered portions rather than all disputed material.

The court also considered the public interest. It agreed that the case involved public-health concerns related to potentially harmful levels of added sugar in products marketed as healthful. But the court found that LeGrand had not sufficiently connected those concerns to the information in the disputed discovery materials. Because the documents had not been filed with a dispositive motion or presented at trial, their potential relevance to the claims and defenses did not, at that stage, establish a public interest strong enough to require disclosure.

Level of Protection

The court held that Abbott’s substantiation research and analysis qualified for the ordinary “Confidential” designation under the protective order. It found that Abbott had not provided enough detail or certainty to show that this material was extremely sensitive or that disclosure posed the substantial risk of serious harm required for a “Highly Confidential” designation.

The court nevertheless found that the product-formulation information met the higher standard and properly remained “Highly Confidential.” The remaining protected substantiation information was to be treated as “Confidential.”

Disposition

The court GRANTED IN PART AND DENIED IN PART Abbott’s Motion to Retain Confidentiality. The order did not decide the merits of LeGrand’s false-advertising claims or Abbott’s defenses.