Document 15-cv-07433

Case 1:15-cv-07433-LAP Document 717 Filed 08/10/20 Page 2 of 3 Honorable Loretta A. Preska August 10, 2020 Page 2 Ms. Maxwell requests a temporary stay of the unsealing process for approximately three weeks until the conclusion of (a) the conferral with the U.S. Attorney's Office to a modification of the Protective Order in the Criminal Action and, if necessary, an application and ruling by Judge Nathan on the issue, to permit the use of the information in this Court and before the Second Circuit (under seal in both courts, if necessary), (b) an application to this Court containing the new information in support of a request to stay the unsealing process until the conclusion of the Criminal Action, and (c) a ruling by this Court on the motion for stay. Streamlining of Unsealing Process: As directed by the Court, counsel for Ms. Maxwell conferred with plaintiff's counsel concerning various proposals to streamline the unsealing process. Subject to Ms. Maxwell's request to temporarily pause the process as described above, defense counsel has agreed to several potential modifications of the Protocol which we hope will ease the burden on the parties and the Court going forward, should the unsealing move ahead. Of note, and as Plaintiff will explain to the Court, the parties have agreed to notify all of the Non-Parties at once so that we can understand which Non-Parties object to the unsealing before deciding how to proceed with future redactions. Although this will give the Court and the Original Parties more information about the scope of objectors, there are limitations to the extent to which it will expedite the process. As counsel has made clear in the past, it will take significant effort by the Original Parties and their staff to put together the excerpts for any Non-Party who requests them because each Non-Party will be entitled to see his or her own information (but not that of other Non-Parties). After receiving a request from a Non-Party, we anticipate it will take up to a week per Non-Party to agree to the excerpts to send to them for review. But on balance we agree that having a sense of the number of participating Non-Parties will aid the Court in conducting future proceedings, we have agreed to Plaintiff's suggestion on that front. The parties can submit a proposed modification of the Protocol and Notice to the Court to reflect this agreement. We also have agreed, as the Court suggested, to shorten the time period for the Original Parties to object and to respond from 14 to 7 days. This would impact paragraphs 2(d), 2(e) and 2(f) of the Protocol. The parties can also submit a proposed modification of the Protocol to the Court. The parties also agreed to leave the time for Non-Parties to object at 14 days given some practical considerations applicable to them. Although the parties were able to reach some agreement, we cannot agree to all of Plaintiff's proposals and write separately to explain the basis for our disagreements. First, we carefully considered the Court's suggestion to reduce the number of pages of briefing to ten pages per side. Id. Our initial Objection (DE 1057) was 14 pages long; Plaintiff's Response was 19 pages. The Court concluded that our Objection was, in many respects, not specific enough. We would ask leave to at least have 15 pages to object to the five motions proposed below, with any response limited to the same. We will endeavor to keep it shorter than that, but also allow for more space to provide specifics to the Court. Second, we have obtained new contact information for Doe 1 from a separate civil suit. We believe that Doe 1 retains a right to notification and participation. We suggest DOJ-OGR-00019322