Alto v. Sun Pharmaceutical Industries, Inc.

Background

The court addressed several applications to seal documents filed in the action. Sun Pharmaceutical Industries, Inc. sought to maintain certain pages of nine exhibits under seal. The exhibits included laboratory notebooks from Pharmalucence describing experiments and data concerning projects other than the products at issue in the case. Sun also filed an amended application seeking to seal portions of the expert report and deposition testimony of Dr. Ian Horn.

The order separately addressed Sun’s motion to exclude the opinions of the plaintiffs’ expert, Timothy Hanrahan, filed at docket 61.

Legal standard

The court applied the three-step test described by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. First, the court determines whether the material is a judicial document—material placed before the court that is relevant to the court’s work and useful in the judicial process. Second, it determines the weight of the public’s presumptive right to access the material. Third, it identifies legitimate reasons against disclosure and balances those reasons against the presumption of access.

Rulings on sealing

The court granted Sun’s application at docket 112. The pages from the Pharmalucence laboratory notebooks concerned projects unrelated to the products at issue and were irrelevant to the court’s decision. The court found that the public interest in disclosing the pages was low and that disclosure could cause competitive harm by revealing information useful to a competitor. Those circumstances overcame the presumption of public access.

The court denied Sun’s amended application at docket 153. The portions of Dr. Horn’s report and deposition testimony that Sun sought to seal were important to evaluating the weight of his testimony, including his experience with active pharmaceutical ingredient suppliers, manufacturing, and product development. Sun did not establish that disclosure would cause competitive harm. The court also noted that much of the information concerned Dr. Horn’s employment from 1990 to 2001 and was at least 20 years old, making competitive harm unlikely. The court directed Sun to file the documents covered by that application on the public docket by October 8, 2021.

The court denied as moot the parties’ remaining sealing applications at docket numbers 65, 69, 74, 76, 79, 84, 86, 101, 108, 110, 118, 120, 125, 127, 143, and 147.

Expert-evidence motion and disposition

The court stated that, for the reasons to be provided in a forthcoming Memorandum Opinion and Order, Sun’s motion to exclude Timothy Hanrahan’s opinions was granted in part and denied in part. The Clerk of Court was directed to terminate the motions listed in the order, including the expert-evidence motion and the sealing applications.

The order therefore resolved the sealing applications and announced a partial ruling on the expert-evidence motion, but it did not provide the reasons for the expert-motion ruling in this order.