Volino v. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company
- Lorna Schofield
- 1:21-cv-06243
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 5
In Volino v. Progressive, Judge Schofield granted a sealing application, keeping a letter containing proprietary business information under seal.
Mitchell International, Inc. and J.D. Power, the third-party subpoena respondents, whose requested confidentiality was granted; the parties and the public remain unable to view the sealed letter at docket number 96.
What happened
In Volino v. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, third-party subpoena respondents Mitchell International, Inc. and J.D. Power asked the court to keep a letter and proposed redactions confidential because they contained commercially sensitive information.
The court granted the application and ordered that the letter at docket number 96 remain under seal. The court credited the respondents’ statements that the information was competitively sensitive, while noting that the public-access presumption was weaker for a pre-motion letter than for a class-certification motion.
Judge Lorna G. Schofield cautioned that such factual claims ordinarily should be supported by evidence and directed the Clerk of Court to close the motions at docket numbers 94 and 102.
The detailed version
- Volino v. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company · No. 1:21-cv-06243
- Lorna Schofield
- Apr. 1, 2022
Background
Mitchell International, Inc. and J.D. Power were third-party subpoena respondents in the litigation. They asked the court to keep under seal a letter at docket number 96, or to allow redactions from the plaintiffs’ March 24, 2022, pre-motion letter. The requested confidentiality concerned descriptions of Mitchell’s method for calculating the Projected Sold Adjustment in its WorkCenter Total Loss product and calculations based on J.D. Power’s proprietary data. The defendants joined the request. The letter stated that the plaintiffs apparently objected to the proposed redactions.
Court’s analysis
The court applied the Second Circuit’s framework for sealing judicial documents. That framework considers whether the material is a judicial document, the weight of any presumption of public access, and competing interests such as privacy and the risk of harm from disclosure. The court stated that the presumption of public access was relatively weaker for a pre-motion letter than for a motion for class certification. It also stated that the redacted information was not critical to decision-making about the pre-motion letter.
The court credited the third-party respondents’ unsworn representations that the redacted information was competitively sensitive and concluded that those representations overcame the weaker presumption of public access at this stage. The court cautioned that factual representations about competitive sensitivity ordinarily should be supported by evidence. It further explained that whether a document is a judicial document depends on the document’s character and relevance to the judicial function, not primarily on where the information came from or how it was labeled under a confidentiality order. The court noted that the analysis could be different for a future class-certification motion or summary-judgment motion.
Ruling
Judge Lorna G. Schofield granted the application. The letter at docket number 96 shall remain under seal. The Clerk of Court was directed to close the motions at docket numbers 94 and 102.
Read the full 5-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.