Unspecified claims against Bayer and other defendants, presumably other pharmaceutical companies, were filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. From there, the claims were put into Multi-District Litigation and assigned to the Southern District of Illinois, before they were sent back to the Northern District of California.
Whew.
You can tell that whatever the claims may be that this is a big case. It is big both for the plaintiffs and for Bayer and the other defendants. The plaintiffs' attorneys in this case come from many places in the country: Oakland; St. Louis; Englewood, Colorado (which is near Denver); New York City; Redwood City, California; San Francisco, and San Mateo, California.
In an unusual twist the defendants' attorneys in this case hail from fewer cities: San Francisco, St. Louis, Denver, and Chicago.
The case is Galinis v. Bayer Corp., No. 09-cv-04980-SI, 2019 WL 1024403 (N.D. Cal. March 4, 2019).
Now that the stage has been set, here's why the Galinis case is of interest to us. The defendant Bayer filed two motions to exclude expert witness testimony that it had done something wrong, and a motion for summary judgment against a claim that it had failed to warn about the alleged bad consequences of one of its pharmaceutical products, i.e., drugs.
In opposition to these motions, the plaintiffs filed what the Federal Court in California calls "opposition documents (briefs and supporting declarations and exhibits) under seal." Galinis v. Bayer Corp., No. 09-cv-04980-SI, 2019 WL 1024403, at *1 (N.D. Cal. March 4, 2019).
The defendant Bayer's motions and the plaintiffs' "opposition documents" were all filed when the case was pending in the Southern District of Illinois.
When this case was transferred back to the Northern District of California after that, the Federal Judge in California ruled that the parties would have to either unseal all the materials or file a motion to seal them that complies with the Local Rules of the Northern District of California. This is the first of two reasons why this case is of interest: Rules of Civil Procedure govern the determination of cases where they are pending, regardless of where they came from, whether from Multi-District Litigation or from Illinois.
The plaintiffs then filed a motion to seal all or some of their "opposition documents." (Even the California Judge was not certain whether the plaintiffs were referring to all or some of these materials and, if they were referring only to some, which ones.) The plaintiffs based their motion to seal in part on a stipulated protective order that they had entered into with Bayer and the other defendants. The plaintiffs followed that stipulated protective order and marked some of their documents as "CONFIDENTIAL" and some as "HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL." That is apparently all that the stipulated protective order required in order for the plaintiffs to try to file their materials under seal.
That brings us to a second reason that this case is of importance to us: The Court held that even when the parties agree to a stipulated protective order, that by itself is not enough to seal the record of Court proceedings. To put it another way, the parties may agree to seal a Court File but only the Court can actually seal a Court File.
The plaintiffs' motion to seal did not comply with Civil Local Rule 79-5, purely and simply, and so their motion to seal was denied. Galinis v. Bayer Corp., No. 09-cv-04980-SI, 2019 WL 1024403, at *2 (N.D. Cal. March 4, 2019).
To summarize, there are at least two lessons to be learned from this case: (1) Rules of Civil Procedure govern the determination of cases in the places where they are pending, regardless of where they came from, whether from Multi-District Litigation which has its own made-up rules, or from a place like the Southern District of Illinois which also has its own rules, and (2) a stipulated protective order, which of course is contractually agreed to by the parties, is not alone enough to seal the record of Court proceedings.
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