Lee v. Hill

Background

The plaintiffs, Brandon Lee and Glen Keith DeMeritt III, and the identified defendants stipulated to a confidentiality and protective order under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(c). The order governs confidential information produced by a party or nonparty in discovery, including documents, testimony, interrogatory answers, electronic files, and other discovery materials.

Terms of the Protective Order

The order permits a party to designate material as confidential when it contains, reflects, or discloses proprietary business information. Parties must use reasonable care not to designate information that is generally available to the public or that they do not have a good-faith basis to treat as confidential.

Confidential material may be disclosed only to specified recipients, including attorneys, certain party personnel, in-house counsel with litigation responsibilities, consultants and experts retained for the case, the court and court personnel, court reporters, and litigation-support providers. Experts and consultants must sign a written confidentiality undertaking before receiving the material.

Recipients may use designated information only in connection with prosecuting or defending this case. The order establishes procedures for unauthorized disclosures, deposition designations, challenges to confidentiality, inadvertent production of privileged information, and inadvertent failures to designate material. It also generally requires confidential filings to be submitted under seal with a publicly filed redacted version.

After final termination of the action by unappealable judgment, exhaustion of appeals, or settlement, the parties generally must return or certify destruction of designated information within 90 calendar days, subject to stated exceptions for work product, privileged communications, certain electronic materials, and archival litigation files retained by counsel. The confidentiality obligations continue after the action ends, except for information that becomes part of the public record.

Court’s Action and Limits

The order states that the court had not reviewed the documents covered by the stipulation and therefore made no finding that they were confidential. Any such determination would be made later, if necessary, through document-by-document review under the court’s rules and the presumption favoring public access to judicial documents. Judge Jesge M. Furman specifically did not order any provision that would allow the parties to file documents under seal without a prior court order.

Effect

The court entered the stipulated protective order subject to those limits. The order regulates discovery and confidentiality; the provided text does not decide the underlying claims or defenses in Lee v. Hill.