In re Foreign Exchange Benchmark Rates Antitrust Litigation
- Lorna Schofield
- 1:13-cv-07789
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 4
In re Foreign Exchange Benchmark Rates Antitrust Litigation: Judge Schofield granted and denied motions to seal in part, requiring further support or less-redacted filings.
The plaintiffs and defendants, the people whose personal information appeared in the filings, businesses whose information was claimed to be confidential, and members of the public seeking access to court records.
What happened
In In re Foreign Exchange Benchmark Rates Antitrust Litigation, the parties asked the court to keep portions of filings related to trial motions, expert testimony, and potential exhibits under seal.
Judge Schofield allowed much of the requested sealing to continue, citing personal information, foreign data-privacy concerns, and confidential business information that was not relied on by the parties or court. But she found that confidentiality labels alone were insufficient and that some older business policies might no longer be competitively sensitive.
The court granted the motions to seal in part and denied them in part without prejudice. Judge Schofield required the parties to either file less-redacted versions or renew their requests with supporting evidence, and directed the clerk to close the ten motions.
The detailed version
- In re Foreign Exchange Benchmark Rates Antitrust Litigation · No. 1:13-cv-07789
- Lorna Schofield
- Oct. 25, 2022
Background
The plaintiffs and defendants filed ten motions seeking to seal portions of papers connected to motions about proposed trial evidence, expert testimony, a proposed verdict form, reconsideration of an earlier evidentiary ruling, and disputes over potential trial exhibits. The filings included deposition excerpts, documentary evidence, expert reports, internal bank policies, and other materials.
Court’s analysis
The court explained that judicial documents generally carry a common-law presumption of public access, but that access is not absolute. Courts must balance that presumption against competing considerations. Here, the court found that redactions were necessary to prevent unauthorized disclosure of personal information, including information concerning people subject to foreign data-privacy regimes.
The court also found that sealing deposition transcripts was necessary to protect confidential business information that no party or the court had relied on and that appeared in exhibits only because it was adjacent to relevant material. The court noted that the portions presented to the jury had already been filed as court exhibits and that publicly filed letters and legal memoranda described the relevant material.
The court rejected several requests supported only by confidentiality designations such as “Confidential” or “Highly Confidential.” Those labels did not control whether documents could be filed under seal. The court also stated that some information based on non-party data appeared sufficiently old that it was no longer competitively sensitive, unless further evidence showed otherwise. Similar concerns applied to internal bank policies that appeared to be almost a decade old or older.
Ruling
The court ordered that the motions to seal were granted in part. Except for the listed exceptions, documents identified in the parties’ appendices were to remain sealed, with access limited to the parties and the individuals identified in the corresponding access appendices.
The court ordered that the motions to seal were also denied in part without prejudice for the specified deposition excerpts, documentary evidence, expert-report material, and other documents where the stated justification was inadequate. The court further ordered that the motions were denied in part to the extent they sought to seal documents admitted into evidence at trial. Trial exhibits could not be redacted more extensively than they had been at trial.
By November 8, 2022, the parties had to file a letter either consenting to public filing and attaching unredacted or more lightly redacted copies, or renewing their motions with additional supporting evidence. The clerk was directed to close the ten motions addressed in the order. This order concerned access to filings and did not decide the underlying antitrust claims.
Read the full 4-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.