Trial Courts Are Not Rubber Stamps When It Comes To Requests to Seal a Settlement

No Rubber Stamps

In the case of Moore v. JB Hunt Transport, Inc., No. 2024-CV-3773 (C.P. Lacka. Co. July 10, 2024 Nealon, J.), the court addressed the novel issue of a request by a Plaintiff’s attorney to seal the amount of a settlement in light to the alleged effect of that settlement on the potential settlement of companion cases.

This case arose out of a fatal motor vehicle collision.  According to the Opinion, several individuals were injured during the course of the accident. 

With regard to this request to seal the judicial record, the counsel for the settling Plaintiff noted that the parties had agreed that the records regarding the settlement should be sealed. The Plaintiff in this case also was requesting a sealing of the record in order to ensure that members of the public, who could potentially be jurors in the cases brought by the other injured parties, could be shielded from information regarding the settlement amount in this particular case. 

At the time of the argument and hearing on the issues presented, the settling Plaintiff’s attorney also argued that the public disclosure of the amount of the settling parties’ settlement could complicate the potential resolution of the claims being asserted by other claimants as a result of the subject accident.

In this Opinion, Judge Terrence R. Nealon of the Lackawanna County Court of Common Pleas reviewed the standard of review for a court faced with a Motion to Seal a Settlement in a personal injury matter.

Judge Nealon noted that to warrant the sealing of public judicial records reflecting the terms and the amount of a settlement, a party requesting the same must demonstrate that the interest in secrecy outweighs a well-settled presumption in favor of public access to judicial records. In order to satisfy a burden of proof in this regard, a party must establish that public access must be prohibited by the court in order to prevent “a clearly defined and serious injury.”

Judge Nealon noted that the sealing of court records is not a perfunctory judicial task that is automatically granted by the agreement of the parties or at the request of a party.  Rather, a sealing of court records is instead only permitted after an informed analysis of the issues presented and approval granted the court in compliance with precedent on the issue.

Here, the court found that the Plaintiff’s stated reasons in support of the request to seal the settlement did not establish the requisite “good cause” for sealing the court record to avoid a “clearly defined and serous injury.” The court also found that the Plaintiff’s stated reasons in support of its request for a sealing of the settlement did not warrant the granting of the court-sanctioned secrecy of the parties’ settlement filings and the records of the state funded judicial system.

As such, the Plaintiff’s request to seal the judicial record was denied.

Anyone wishing to review a copy of this decision may click this LINK.

Superior Court Upholds Trial Court's Decision Not to Seal Record on Med Mal Settlement

In the case of A.A. v. Glicken, No. 2020 Pa. Super. 197 (Pa. Super. Aug. 14, 2020 Olson, J., Dubow, J., and McLaughlin, J.) (Op. by Olson, J.), the court upheld a Luzerne County trial judge’s decision not to seal a settlement agreement in a minor’s medical malpractice lawsuit. 

In so ruling, the appellate court rejected the Defendants’ argument that not sealing the settlement agreement would have a chilling effect on future settlements and would go against the parties’ interests in privacy. The appellate court found no abuse of discretion by the trial court in denying the Motion to Seal. 

The Superior Court also ruled that the Defendants did not overcome the common law presumption of openness in courts and the Defendant did not meet their burden of showing good cause for sealing the record. 

Anyone wishing to review a copy of this decision may click this LINK. 

Source: “Luzerne Judge’s Refusal to Seal Settlement Agreement in Med Mal Case Upheld,” by P.J. D’Annunzio of the Pennsylvania Law Weekly (Aug. 20, 2020).

Standards for Sealing Judicial Record Reviewed

In the case of Moses Taylor Foundation v. Coverys, No. 19-CV-7423 (C.P. Lacka. Co. May 8, 2020 Nealon, J.), the court addressed a Plaintiff’s request to seal an insurance bad faith liability case. 

The Plaintiffs in this matter are a hospital and its self-insurance trust. The Plaintiff filed a breach of contract and bad faith liability case against the hospital’s excess liability carrier and its underwriter. The Plaintiff hospital and its self-insurance trust assert bad faith conduct on the part of the Defendant carriers in refusing to resolve a malpractice case pursuant at the request of the hospital and the trust which allegedly caused the avoidable depletion of the excess coverage funds, thereby resulting in less aggregate excess coverage being available for the hospital to cover other malpractice cases against it. 

With respect to this particular motion before the court, the hospital and the trust were seeking to seal its Complaint and the entire record in this litigation on the basis that such a sealing of the record was necessary to preserve the confidentiality of its settlement negotiations, evaluation methods, and payments in the medical malpractice case as well as other issues. 

The Defendant carriers opposed the motion by arguing that the hospital and trust had not identified a clearly defined serious injury that any of the parties will suffer from public access to the record in this litigation. The Defendants described the matter as nothing more than a run-of-the-mill action alleging a breach of contract and bad faith conduct on the part of a carrier, which does to warrant the sealing of a record. 

Overall, the court noted that, in order to warrant the closure of an entire judicial record, a moving party must establish that their interest in secrecy outweighs the longstanding common law presumption in favor of public access to the records of the taxpayer-subsidized judicial system. 

The court noted that many of the topics that the Plaintiff wanted protected from public disclosure were already matters of public record in the underlying malpractice action. It was also noted that the settlement discussions, evaluation methods, and claims handling practices that the hospital and trust were attempting to have remain confidential are the types of information that are routinely disclosed in courts of law involving bad faith claims against insurance companies. 

In the end, the court found that the secrecy interests cited by the hospital and the trust do not supersede the presumption in favor of open access to the judicial records so as to justify a court-sanctioned closure of the record.

As such, the Motion to Seal the Records in the case was denied. 

Anyone wishing to review a copy of this decision may click this LINK.