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. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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