Bad News/Good News: The Courts Don’t Care About Your Secrets

It used to be fairly simply to share a secret with a federal court in Tennessee by filing a sensitive document “under seal.” It isn’t anymore. The courts don’t care about keeping your secrets, at least not as much as they care about preserving public access to the courts.

Before a recent trio of Sixth Circuit opinions, a motion to file sensitive business information “under seal” might only involve a single page or even a single sentence citing an agreement between the parties. When used in moderation (and even when not used in moderation), those perfunctory motions were routinely granted by the courts. As a result, many cases went forward with significant documents that were available to the parties and the court, but not the public. From the perspective of litigants and trial courts, it was easy and efficient. But according to the Sixth Circuit, it was wrong.

Last summer, starting with Shane Group, Inc. v. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, the Sixth Circuit reminded the lower courts that only a few narrow categories of information—true trade secrets, information covered by a recognized privilege, and information protected by statute (e.g., taxpayer IDs and protected health information)—are entitled to a judicial seal. Otherwise, the public courts are just that: public. The substantive standards in Shane Group are nothing new—they come directly from a 1983 decision, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. v. FTC —but the renewed emphasis still represents a fundamental change to the practice of Tennessee’s federal courts.

The Sixth Circuit added new procedural requirements to reinforce the old substantive standard, and they’re working. Any order sealing records must explain how the document in question satisfies Shane Group. So, moving forward, any litigant seeking a seal must do that legal and factual work for the district court. And, looking backward, every generic, one-page order is vulnerable. The Sixth Circuit has vacated those orders on its own when it encounters them on appeal, and district courts have been issuing “show cause” orders requiring parties to justify pre-Shane Group seals as a part of routine case management.

The bad news for litigants is this: The courts don’t care about protecting your run-of-the-mill secrets. So, if you have documents under seal in federal courts in Tennessee (or elsewhere in the Sixth Circuit), don’t expect them to stay that way.

The good news is the same: The courts don’t care about revealing your secrets either. Accordingly, now that they cannot promise to keep your secrets, district judges and magistrate judges seem open to working with litigants to keep unnecessary secrets out of the courts’ records to begin with. Generally, the courts are happy to help the parties find ways to document the relevant facts while leaving voluminous, largely irrelevant, and commercially sensitive documents to the side.

Everyone has secrets. If yours are under seal in the federal courts, you should be preparing a Shane Group strategy now. Your show cause order is coming. If your secrets aren’t under seal yet, you need to have a Shane Group strategy for discovery and motion practice. We’ll address both of those topics in future posts.