FEDERAL COURT, Aug 18 – In the Northern
District of California's version of the sealing beat this
series has tracked from the Eastern District of California
to Colorado to Massachusetts, Inner City Press's motion to
intervene has now been formally docketed — not as a letter
sitting in a chambers inbox, but as an entry with its own
docket text, its own deadlines, and its own party
designation: Inner City Press, Intervenor.
The underlying case, In re Ex Parte
Application of SGT ELT BidCo GmbH, No. 3:26-mc-80200-JSC,
is a Section 1782 application by a German entity seeking
U.S. discovery, evidently concerning Summit Partners,
L.P., now listed as Defendant, for use in litigation in
Germany.
The Applicant's own papers argued
that its filings should be sealed in this country because,
although the underlying German proceeding is public and
any member of the public may attend its hearings, German
courts do not post filings and discovery materials online
the way American ones do. Inner City Press's motion, filed
July 16, called this what it is: an invitation for
American courts to level their own transparency down to
whatever a foreign forum happens to publish least — "the
strong discovery of the United States, at the disclosure
standards of a forum that has no PACER."
The docket entry, filed by court staff on
July 17, does not merely acknowledge the motion. It sets a
full briefing schedule: any response is due July 30, 2026;
any reply, August 6. That is the architecture this series
has argued for since a Colorado magistrate first modeled
it — not silence, not an unreasoned grant, but a real
schedule on a real docket, with the press listed as a
party to it.
The case was recently reassigned to
District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley under this
District's blind, proportionate assignment system. Whether
Judge Corley will hold the Applicant to the Ninth
Circuit's compelling-reasons standard for its blanket
sealing request, or accept the transparency-arbitrage
argument advanced in the ex parte papers, will now play
out on a public docket, on a public schedule, with Inner
City Press formally positioned to be heard.
Update, August 18: Judge Jacqueline Scott
Corley has ruled, and Inner City Press's objection
succeeded on the point that mattered most. Quoting
directly from Inner City Press's own filing, that "neither
the Response nor any public filing identifies what German
law, regulation, contractual provision, or court order
imposes this obligation," Judge Corley found "this lack of
clarity prompted Inner City Press's motion to intervene,"
and agreed: "In this respect, the motions to seal are
overbroad."
SGT ELT and Summit Partners had redacted
even the bare fact that a German arbitration was underway
and the text of the arbitration rules themselves, both
freely available on the German Arbitration Institute's own
public website. The Court held that information not
sealable — "that the 'German proceeding' is a private
arbitration is not sealable," nor are the published rules
that govern it.
What remains properly sealed is narrower:
the parties' confidential purchase agreement and the
actual substance of what has occurred inside the
arbitration, which the Court found protectable under
principles of international comity, citing the Seventh
Circuit's GEA Group v. Flex-N-Gate and a similar Northern
District of California ruling involving Beijing
Arbitration Commission proceedings. SGT and Summit have
until September 3 to file a new, narrower sealing motion
consistent with the ruling, meaning the fact and general
nature of the German case, previously hidden, should now
become public, even as the underlying commercial terms
remain sealed. Inner City Press's motion to intervene was
denied only as moot, the Court having already granted the
substance of what it sought. Watch this site.
