Credit: ALM
MetLife was represented by a Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher team that included Eugene Scalia, a partner at the firm who successfully challenged, in the trial court, the “systemically important” designation. Gibson Dunn partner Amir Tayrani argued in the D.C. Circuit on the question of whether the redactions in the case record were proper.
A MetLife spokesperson said in a statement: “We are reviewing the court’s decision and will be considering our options.”
Better Markets, represented by an in-house team, said MetLife’s lawyers and the Justice Department attorneys representing the financial oversight council, “have created a litigation record largely shrouded in secrecy.” Rather than allow those attorneys to decide what information should be kept confidential, Better Markets’ lawyers argued that the court should make an independent determination.
In May 2016, two months after striking down the government’s designation of MetLife as “systemically important”—the technical phrase for “too big to fail”—Judge Rosemary Collyer rejected Better Markets’ effort to unseal records in the case. Collyer said Better Markets had wrongly assumed that she had “not reviewed the record in this case or the extensive briefs filed in it, and that the court instead has allowed the parties alone to determine what should be redacted.”
“That assumption is in error,” she wrote. “Just as importantly, the law protects MetLife’s submissions to FSOC and FSOC’s discussion of them. Finally, the need to unseal the record is lessened because the court’s prior opinion and order contain no redactions and can be fully understood.”
Better Markets’ legal director, Stephen Hall, said in a statement Tuesday that the D.C. Circuit’s decision “is a huge victory for the American people and their right to know how our courts and agencies are protecting the public interest.”
This story was updated with additional comment about the ruling.
