loanDepot.com, LLC v. CrossCountry Mortgage, LLC
- Lorna Schofield
- 1:22-cv-05971
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 5
In loanDepot.com v. CrossCountry Mortgage, Judge Schofield granted in part and denied in part a motion to seal documents.
The ruling affects the individual defendants, loanDepot.com, LLC, non-party customers whose information appears in the filings, and members of the public seeking access to the court record.
What happened
In loanDepot.com, LLC v. CrossCountry Mortgage, LLC, the individual defendants asked to file certain exhibits and related passages under seal while opposing loanDepot’s request for a preliminary injunction.
Some materials had been labeled confidential by loanDepot, while others contained customer identities and contact information. The defendants argued that customer privacy and federal protections for customer information justified sealing or redacting those materials.
Judge Schofield granted in part and denied in part the motion, without prejudice to renewal. She allowed redactions protecting non-party customer information, rejected redactions for pages that did not identify customers, and allowed loanDepot to seek continued sealing of materials it had designated confidential.
The detailed version
- loanDepot.com, LLC v. CrossCountry Mortgage, LLC · No. 1:22-cv-05971
- Lorna Schofield
- June 6, 2023
Background
The individual defendants moved for permission to file under seal, or in redacted form, exhibits and portions of their filings opposing loanDepot’s motion for a preliminary injunction. The requested materials were attached to declarations and included documents marked confidential or highly confidential by loanDepot, as well as documents the individual defendants said contained customer identities, contact information, and other customer information.
The court’s protective-order rules allowed parties to designate certain materials as confidential, but the court explained that those designations did not by themselves decide whether the public could access judicial documents. The court applied the public-access analysis described in Lugosch v. Pyramid Co. of Onondaga: it considered whether the materials were judicial documents, the strength of the public-access presumption, and competing interests such as privacy.
Ruling
The court granted in part and denied in part without prejudice to renewal the individual defendants’ motion. Materials described in the motion as marked confidential or highly confidential by loanDepot appeared to include information designated confidential by the parties, but those designations alone were not enough to justify sealing. LoanDepot was permitted to file a request by June 9, 2023, explaining why those materials should remain sealed under Second Circuit law. The court directed that currently sealed materials remain sealed while loanDepot considered whether to make that request.
For the documents described in Section II of the motion, the court found that redaction was necessary to prevent disclosure of non-party customers’ identities and that their privacy interests outweighed the public’s right of access at that stage. However, pages 1 and 2 of Exhibit 1 to the Jeffrey L. Widman declaration, identified as Dkt. 273-1, did not contain customer-identifying information and could not be filed in redacted form.
The court directed the defendants to file the specified memorandum and exhibits in redacted form by June 9, 2023, and directed the clerk to close the motion at Dkt. No. 267. The order addressed access to court filings; it did not decide the parties’ underlying dispute or loanDepot’s preliminary-injunction motion.
Read the full 5-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.