A federal judge has ruled on whether a key document in the Brian Flores litigation stays under seal. The ruling is under seal too.
So the public's takeaway from this week is that it got nothing. That is where the case against the NFL and four clubs, the Dolphins, Texans, Giants, and Broncos, sits more than four years after Flores filed it.
The document at the center of the current fight came from Korn Ferry, the search firm that ran a coaching search for the Ravens. It surfaced through a subpoena, not through discovery turned over by a defendant, and Korn Ferry is trying to keep it out of public view. Baltimore isn't a party to the suit.
That last detail is the one worth tracking. A third-party vendor, hired to run a hiring process, is now the entity arguing hardest for confidentiality. Search firms sell discretion as part of the service. A client that hires Korn Ferry expects its internal deliberations to stay internal. Korn Ferry's motion is what a business protecting its product looks like.
Flores's underlying claims are unchanged. He accused the Broncos and Giants of conducting sham interviews and the Dolphins and Texans of retaliation. The Rooney Rule, adopted by the league in 2003 to require minority candidates be interviewed for head-coaching vacancies, is the policy backdrop. The allegation has always been that an interview requirement is not the same as an interview that matters. A judge has already allowed the case to proceed in court, turning back the argument that these claims belonged behind closed doors in arbitration.
That is what makes the sealing fight more than housekeeping. A lawsuit about the opacity of NFL hiring is being litigated in significant part behind sealed filings, where the public cannot see the evidence that would test either side's account. The league has every incentive to let that state of affairs continue; delay costs it nothing and keeps the substance out of view.
My read: this seal is a stage, not a destination. Courts disfavor indefinite sealing once the press and the parties press the issue, and Korn Ferry's commercial interest in confidentiality is narrower than a blanket seal. Expect the document to surface in redacted form, and expect the redactions to be the story. Whoever wins the fight over what stays blacked out will have won something real.
