Geigtech East Bay LLC v. Lutron Electronics Co., Inc.

Nature of the order

The court approved an agreed protective order under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(c). The order governs confidential information produced during discovery in this lawsuit. It does not decide the parties’ underlying claims or defenses.

Protected information

The order permits a party or nonparty producing information to designate material as either “CONFIDENTIAL” or “CONFIDENTIAL ATTORNEYS EYES ONLY.” Protected information must generally involve trade secrets, confidential research, development, or commercial information, or material subject to a confidentiality obligation. The producing party must make designations in good faith and must withdraw or change a designation if the material does not qualify for the protection initially asserted.

“CONFIDENTIAL ATTORNEYS EYES ONLY” is reserved for especially sensitive material, including commercially sensitive marketing, financial, sales, research and development, technical, pricing, customer, employee, future-product, and strategic-plan information, as well as information whose disclosure could cause economic harm or a significant competitive disadvantage.

Who may access the information

Documents designated “CONFIDENTIAL” may be shown to outside litigation counsel and their support personnel, qualified technical advisers who sign the required agreement, involved party employees who sign that agreement, the court and its personnel, certain translators and litigation-support providers, mediators, and specified original recipients or sources of the information. “CONFIDENTIAL ATTORNEYS EYES ONLY” material may be shown to a narrower group, including outside counsel, qualified technical advisers, court personnel, certain support providers, mediators, specified original sources, and qualifying in-house counsel.

Protected information may be used only for this litigation. The order bars use for business, competitive, patent-prosecution, or other proceeding-related purposes and restricts access by unauthorized people. It also generally prohibits removing protected information from the United States or viewing it electronically outside the United States, subject to stated exceptions.

Experts and technical advisers

Before protected information is disclosed to a technical adviser, the receiving party must provide advance written notice and specified information about the adviser. The producing party has seven business days to object. If the objection is not timely made, the adviser is generally treated as qualified to receive the information identified in the notice. If an objection remains, the objecting party may ask the court to prohibit disclosure, and the objecting party bears the burden of showing by a preponderance of the evidence that disclosure should be prohibited.

Challenges and court filings

A receiving party may challenge a confidentiality designation at any time. The parties must first try to resolve the dispute informally. If they cannot do so within the specified period, the receiving party may ask the court to cancel or modify the designation. Until the court rules, the information remains protected, and the designating party bears the burden of proving that the information is confidential.

Protected material filed with the court must be filed under seal as required by the court’s procedures. The parties must also meet before the pretrial conference to propose procedures for handling protected information at trial.

Privilege and inadvertent disclosure

The order does not require disclosure of material protected by attorney-client privilege, work-product protection, or another applicable protection. If privileged material is inadvertently produced, the producing party may request its return, and the receiving party must follow the order’s procedures for returning or destroying it. Inadvertent production of protected information without the required label generally does not waive confidentiality, subject to the order’s notice and correction procedures.

After the litigation

The order remains binding after the case ends unless a producing party agrees otherwise in writing or a court orders otherwise. Within 60 days after a final non-appealable judgment, order, or complete settlement, protected physical materials and documents generally must be returned or destroyed at the producing party’s option, with limited archival exceptions for outside counsel. The Southern District of New York retains jurisdiction to interpret and enforce the order after the litigation ends.

Court’s addendum

The court’s addendum states that approving the stipulation does not make the court a party to it or mean that the court agrees that party-designated material is actually confidential. The court begins with a presumption that the entire record should be publicly available. If a future decision refers to confidential material, the decision will not be published for ten days, allowing the parties to identify proposed redactions and explain why the material is genuinely confidential. The court will decide whether any redaction is justified. If the addendum was unacceptable to the parties, the court stated that it would not sign the stipulation and that disputes could instead be sent to a magistrate judge for document-by-document review.