Accent Delight International Ltd. v. Sotheby's
- Jesse Furman
- 1:18-cv-09011
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 2
In Accent Delight v. Sotheby's, Judge Furman partly granted and partly denied one sealing motion and denied another.
The plaintiffs, Sotheby’s, Yves Bouvier, and members of the public seeking access to the court filings were affected. The order allowed redactions for six pages containing Bouvier’s artwork valuation and required specified filings to become publicly viewable.
What happened
In Accent Delight International Ltd. v. Sotheby’s, the court considered two requests to keep filings connected to expert-testimony motions secret or partly hidden from the public. Sotheby’s had not timely submitted the required explanation for keeping most of the information sealed.
The court said these filings are court records covered by a strong presumption of public access. It allowed six pages containing a non-party’s private artwork valuation to remain redacted because the valuation had little apparent relevance and could harm that person’s competitive position if disclosed.
Judge Furman granted in part and denied in part the plaintiffs’ first motion, and denied the plaintiffs’ second motion in full. He directed the plaintiffs to publicly file a properly redacted version of the exhibit and directed the Clerk to make specified filings public.
The detailed version
- Accent Delight International Ltd. v. Sotheby's · No. 1:18-cv-09011
- Jesse Furman
- Mar. 3, 2022
Background
The court considered two motions by the plaintiffs to seal or redact submissions related to pending motions to exclude expert testimony. The court stated that the filings were “judicial documents,” meaning records filed in connection with the court’s exercise of its judicial authority. Those records therefore carried a common-law presumption that the public could access them.
The court applied the three-part access test used in the Second Circuit. It considered whether the records were judicial documents, how much weight the presumption of access deserved based on the records’ role in the case, and whether competing interests justified restricting access. The party seeking secrecy bears the burden of showing that the interests favoring non-access outweigh the interests favoring public access.
Analysis
Sotheby’s was the party seeking to keep the disputed files sealed or redacted, except for one filing involving a request by Yves Bouvier, a non-party. The court found that Sotheby’s had not timely filed the letter required by the court’s Individual Rules and Practices. Because Sotheby’s failed to meet its burden of justifying non-access, the court did not maintain the sealing or redaction requests for the documents at issue.
The court reached a different conclusion regarding six pages of Exhibit F to the February 18, 2022 Declaration of Daniel J. Kornstein. Bouvier sought redactions of those pages because they contained the valuation of an artwork. The court found that the valuation was likely to have little, if any, relevance to the court’s decision on the related expert-testimony motion. It also found that Bouvier had a strong interest in keeping the valuation confidential because disclosure could put him at a competitive disadvantage if he later sought to resell the artwork. The court concluded that these third-party privacy and business interests outweighed the presumption of public access for those six pages.
Disposition
The court granted in part and denied in part the plaintiffs’ first motion to seal, docketed as ECF No. 398. Specifically, it permitted the plaintiffs to keep pages 37 through 42 of Exhibit F to the February 18, 2022 Kornstein Declaration in redacted form. The court denied the plaintiffs’ second motion to seal, docketed as ECF No. 402, in full.
The court ordered the plaintiffs to publicly file, no later than March 7, 2022, a copy of Exhibit F with proposed redactions consistent with the opinion. It also directed the Clerk of Court to change the listed filings to “public view” and to terminate ECF Nos. 398 and 402.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.