Hudock v. LG Electronics U.S.A., Inc.
- John Tunheim
- 0:16-cv-01220
- U.S. District Court · District of Minnesota
- 3
In Hudock v. LG Electronics U.S.A., Inc., Magistrate Judge Menendez granted the parties’ sealing motion, ordering some documents unsealed and others kept confidential.
The plaintiffs, defendants, and the public’s access to documents filed in the class-certification proceedings.
What happened
In Hudock v. LG Electronics U.S.A., Inc., the court considered the parties’ joint request about 136 documents temporarily sealed during the class-certification proceedings. The parties agreed that 43 documents should be unsealed and 7 should remain sealed; they disagreed about 86 others.
The court applied a lower confidentiality standard because the documents related to procedural requirements for class certification rather than the merits of the claims. It found that the defendants had shown enough justification to keep the disputed documents sealed at this stage, although it warned that many might not remain sealed if later used in summary-judgment proceedings or at trial.
Magistrate Judge Katherine Menendez granted the motion as specified in the order, directed the clerk to unseal the 43 agreed-upon entries, keep the 7 agreed-upon entries and 86 disputed entries sealed, and required the defendants to publicly refile the disputed documents with specified redactions within 21 days.
The detailed version
- Hudock v. LG Electronics U.S.A., Inc. · No. 0:16-cv-01220
- John Tunheim
- Jan. 2, 2020
Background
The court addressed the parties’ Joint Motion Regarding Continued Sealing. The motion concerned 136 documents filed under temporary seal in connection with the plaintiffs’ motion for class certification.
The parties agreed that 7 documents should remain sealed and that 43 should be unsealed. They disagreed about the remaining 86 documents. The defendants argued that confidentiality justified keeping those documents sealed, while the plaintiffs argued that the defendants had not met their burden to justify withholding them from the public.
Legal standard
The court applied the standards from IDT Corp. v. eBay. It concluded that, because the underlying class-certification motion concerned the procedural requirements of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 and did not ask the court to decide the merits of the deceptive-advertising claims, the documents were not “judicial records” at this stage. As a result, the court applied the more lenient “good cause” standard under Rule 26(c).
Under that standard, defendants had to show that continued sealing was needed to protect them from annoyance, embarrassment, oppression, or undue burden or expense. The rule permits protection for trade secrets and confidential research, development, or commercial information. The court found that the defendants met that burden for the documents about which the parties disagreed.
The court also stated that many of those documents might not satisfy the stricter standard for sealing judicial records if they were later relied on in summary-judgment briefing or at trial. It specifically referred to email chains discussing the defendants’ marketing and advertising of high-definition television refresh rates, which the court described as a fundamental merits issue in the litigation.
Order
The court granted the joint motion as follows:
- The clerk was directed to unseal the 43 docket entries the parties agreed should be unsealed. - The clerk was directed to keep the 7 docket entries the parties agreed should remain sealed under seal. - After independently reviewing the 86 disputed docket entries, the court directed the clerk to keep them under seal. - The defendants were ordered to publicly refile the disputed documents within 21 days, incorporating the proposed redactions identified in Exhibit 8 to the supporting declaration.
Magistrate Judge Katherine Menendez signed the order.
Read the full 3-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.