White & Case lawyers in Washington, backed by pro-business and criminal defense advocacy groups, are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn an appeals court ruling that gave federal prosecutors access to foreign documents usually outside the reach of grand jury subpoenas.

U.S. Department of Justice prosecutors, investigating price-fixing in the liquid crystal display panel market, served grand jury subpoenas on four law firms involved in parallel civil and criminal proceedings in federal district court in San Francisco. The government wanted access to civil discovery, including hundreds of thousands of pages of transactional data, that entered the United States from companies overseas.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston quashed subpoenas targeting firms that included White & Case, K&L Gates, Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein and Nossaman, saying the case raised novel issues with “far-reaching implications” about the power of the grand jury. In December, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously reversed Illston’s decision, ruling that the government’s grand jury subpoenas trumped the civil protective order in the related class action.

Circuit courts are divided over whether grand jury subpoenas always override protective orders, and White & Case, which represents Toshiba Corp. in the antitrust investigation, wants the Supreme Court to establish a clear path for federal trial court judges

via Appeal Over Access to Foreign Documents Tests Grand Juries’ Power to Ignore Protective Orders.