A Manhattan federal judge on Wednesday appeared inclined to adopt a three-tiered approach to reviewing documents that remain sealed in a settled defamation case by an accuser of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, after an appeals court last month released an initial tranche of previously confidential filings.

The proposed procedure, floated by attorneys for longtime Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, would designate materials as “judicial,” “non-judicial” or an in-between category referred to Wednesday as “negligibly judicial.”