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By Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon
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SDNY COURTHOUSE, Sept 13 – Samantha Siva Kumaran sued Northland Energy Trading LLC for allegedly keeping and using her risk hedging software - then she wanted many of the pleadings and exhibits kept secret and sealed.

  U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil held a proceeding on June 18.

Inner City Press covered it. Kumaran repeatedly asked to have forthcoming filings sealed. Judge Vyskocil to her credit said, That's not how it works in Federal court.  

  Well, it's not supposed to be how it works. 

   Ultimately Judge Vyskocil issued an order denying the motion to strike document from the record, and referring the plaintiff's motion for a protective order to Magistrate Judge Freeman.

 Now in September Kumaran has argued to exceed page limits in responding to the Motion to Dismiss: "Plaintiffs respectfully remind the Court that this case arose out of the prior action in 2015 with the Defendants that resulted in the Settlement in 2016 (ECF52.1). In order to not cause another hasty review of issues which resulted in premature settlement, and since this is the 2nd time these Defendants have been brought before this Honorable Court, Plaintiffs are respectfully requesting the issues are reviewed thoroughly. Any unfortunate deletion of issues (to meet a page count), or improper discussion on the multiple terms of engagement letters procedurally requires the Court to take time to understand the distinctions in breaches that could lead to prejudice to the parties and unfair bucketing of issues which each require careful and fair analysis. 11. Defendants also have over-bucketed breaches (for example improperly bucketing all the misappropriation of trade secrets acts of “acquisition”, “disclosure” and “use” to one date instead of reviewing all the separate acts that constitute a cause of action). This creates an oversimplification (noting the Defendants bucket for example the misappropriation of trade secrets claims to wholly ignore the misappropriation that occurred after September 2016, and also ignoring those under NY Law). Page count limits are not intended to wash over facts, or commingle Federal and State law, or prevent one party from correctly identifying for example five separate breaches. 12. Resolution of these issues at this stage at the MTD, will reduce burden on the Court in the future (potentially reduce future amendments and/or other motion practice) and make a thorough and wellthought out analysis in this important motion. 13. Plaintiff is for the most part Pro-Se, and even though counsel have appeared for AStar, Plaintiff Kumaran’s substantial individual claims are not being represented on the record by counsel. Therefore Plaintiff still needs a little lenience from the Court. As indicated prior, majority of the substantial claims are owned by Pro-Se Plaintiff – and the events related to the CTA, unfair competition and events after September 2016 between Larkin and Kumaran are for the most part individual claims, as well as Kumaran is the sole owner of the trade secrets." This was granted. Inner City Press will continue to cover this case. 

The case is Kumaran et al v. Northland Energy Trading, LLC et al., 19-cv-8345 (Vyskocil / Freeman). 

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