Syntel Sterling Best Shores Mauritius Limited v. The Trizetto Group, Inc.
- Lorna Schofield
- 1:15-cv-00211
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 2
In Syntel Sterling Best Shores v. The Trizetto Group, Judge Schofield granted in part redaction requests and granted requests to file joint sealing requests.
Syntel, the defendants, and the public: the parties received instructions about which information could be redacted and how future sealing requests must be filed, while the public version had to disclose the specified damages figures.
What happened
In Syntel Sterling Best Shores Mauritius Limited v. The Trizetto Group, Inc., the parties asked to redact sensitive business information from their pretrial memoranda and to file joint requests concerning redactions to responses.
The court granted in part the redaction requests at Docket Nos. 639, 644, 654, and 655. It did not allow defendants to redact damages figures on specified pages and ordered defendants to file a new public version by September 11, 2020. The court also granted the requests at Docket Nos. 657 and 658 to file joint sealing requests.
Judge Lorna G. Schofield explained that public access to court documents is important but not absolute, and found that the approved redactions were narrowly tailored to protect sensitive business information. She also set filing requirements for future sealing requests.
The detailed version
- Syntel Sterling Best Shores Mauritius Limited v. The Trizetto Group, Inc. · No. 1:15-cv-00211
- Lorna Schofield
- Sept. 9, 2020
Background
Syntel Inc. and Syntel Sterling Best Shores Mauritius Ltd. (together, “Syntel”) and The TriZetto Group Inc. and Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. asked to redact information from their pretrial memoranda. The requests were made in letters dated August 31 and September 4, 2020. The parties later asked for permission to file joint requests concerning redactions to their responses to the pretrial memoranda.
Rulings
The court granted in part the redaction requests at Docket Nos. 639, 644, 654, and 655. The court stated that the proposed redactions were narrowly tailored to prevent unauthorized dissemination of sensitive business information, except for defendants’ proposed redactions of damages figures in their pretrial memorandum at Docket No. 640, on pages 11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 24, and 25. Defendants were ordered to file, by September 11, 2020, a public redacted version that did not redact those damages figures.
The court also ordered defendants to file a public redacted version of Syntel’s pretrial memorandum, including the redactions proposed in Docket No. 656. The court granted the requests at Docket Nos. 657 and 658 to file joint requests concerning redactions to the parties’ responses to the pretrial memoranda, and ordered the parties to file those requests by September 10, 2020.
Reasoning and Filing Instructions
The court recognized a strong common-law right of public access to judicial documents but explained that the right is not absolute. Courts must balance that presumption against competing considerations, including the protection of sensitive business information. For future submissions, the court required joint redaction requests to be filed on the same date as the underlying filings and to include both a sealed version with proposed redactions highlighted and a public version showing the proposed redactions. The Clerk was directed to close Docket Nos. 639, 644, 655, 657, and 658.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.