Hundreds of pages of court documents unsealed by U.S. District Judge Charles A. Pannell after he vacated a $37 million trade secrets verdict won by Lockheed Martin last year reveal that the company withheld internal corporate e-mails from the court that may have contradicted testimony of its witnesses. Pannell issued an order unsealing the documents on April 13 after an inquiry by the Fulton County Daily Report, which had sought access to a dozen court pleadings and more than 100 exhibits that Lockheed and Greenville, Texas-based defendant L-3 Communications Integrated Systems had filed under seal. In sealing the pleadings, the parties had cited a broad joint confidentiality order Pannell had signed at their request in 2006 and a separate confidentiality order in place in ongoing litigation between the parties in federal court in Texas.
The push to seal court pleadings under broad protective orders and, thus, evade public scrutiny is a growing phenomenon in Georgia’s Northern District that has resulted in lawyers designating pleadings as confidential when they file them with the court clerk without an individual review by the trial judge.
The previously sealed pleadings and exhibits all pertain to allegations by L-3 lawyers that Lockheed intentionally withheld evidence critical to L-3′s defense and, in doing so, “undoubtedly changed the outcome of the trial.”
Prior to the Fulton County Daily Report inquiry, the only public information about the claims — which eventually prompted Pannell to toss out both the verdict and Lockheed’s motion for more than $16 million in legal fees — was the judge’s eight-page order for a new trial. In that order, Pannell said it was “undisputed” that Lockheed had failed during the trial to turn over documents showing that long before it sued L-3, it had knowingly allowed a competitor to utilize its proprietary data without a license. However, the judge said he was “hesitant” to say that Lockheed withheld the information intentionally, given the voluminous number of documents involved.
That information was crucial to the case because, according to the unsealed documents, Pannell had instructed the jury that “once trade secret status is lost, it is lost forever.”
Neither L-3 nor Lockheed objected to unsealing the pleadings on which Pannell had based his new trial order.
via Law.com – Lockheed Withheld Discovery Documents in Trade Secrets Case, Court Records Show.
