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I imagine that in time, the documents are eventually unsealed through some means. I seem to recall reading about that being done via a third party that wanted to take a look at a much older trial.

I suspect that's also the most common method:

Someone a number of years (like 10's of) later - when the "company strategic documents" are no longer of strategy - requests the documents be unsealed. That is examined by the Courts. Most likely the unsealing is granted.

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• Eventual unsealing - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 18 2012 @ 12:43 PM EDT

Think about it from the innocent defendant's perspective: you haven't done anything wrong, but to defend yourself and prove it you have to show information you really don't want your competitors to have because it'll tell them how you do something they haven't managed yet. Is it fair to you that to clear your name you have to hand over to your competition everything you've so carefully kept them from finding out about your operations? So the courts have procedures in place to allow parties to reveal information that the court needs to make a good decision but that the parties have a right to keep confidential outside the context of the court.

NB: I've been in that kind of case from the defense side. We were in the clear and could easily prove it, but proving it required showing huge amounts of our strategic planning and systems development outline, information that'd show a competitor exactly how to attack our market share if they had it. Worse yet, the other party in the suit was a competitor. We would've been well and truly up the creek if we hadn't had a way to present the information we needed to defend ourselves without completely sacrificing it's confidentiality.

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