Judges in the district are accepting public comment on the proposed local rule modification until Friday, May 1, at 4 p.m., according to an April 2 notice posted earlier this month on the court's website. The proposed rule change would alter Civil Local Rule 77-3 to allow remote audio access to civil jury trials based on the presiding judge's discretion.
Although the proposed rule change would allow audio access, it specifically prohibits video access to civil jury trials. The rule also notes that remote audio access would not be permitted in scenarios that risk interfering with the integrity of the court proceedings, including creating safety or privacy risks or materially impacting witness testimony.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, judges in California's Northern District have already allowed remote audio access to certain high-profile bench trials, including Epic Games Inc.'s landmark antitrust fight against Apple Inc., and a bench trial against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over the risks of adding fluoride to drinking water.
Headline-grabbing trials that involve testimony from some of the world's highest-paid executives regularly land on court dockets in California's Northern District, which covers Oakland, San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The district's jurisdictional borders extend as far south as Monterey County and as far north as Del Norte County, which borders Oregon.
Just last month, South African billionaire Elon Musk took the stand in a jury trial over Twitter investors' claims that Musk tanked the company's stock. In that case, after a weeks long trial, a San Francisco jury found Musk made false or misleading public statements, but cleared Musk of other allegations that his conduct constituted an overall "scheme to defraud Twitter investors."
Musk is expected to return to the stand before a jury in the coming weeks in Oakland in a separate high-stakes fraud suit against OpenAI Inc., its CEO Sam Altman, who is also expected to testify, and Microsoft Inc.
Meanwhile, this summer, Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel are slated to take the stand in the first school district bellwether jury trial in multidistrict litigation over the alleged harms of social media addiction.
During a pretrial hearing in the MDL on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers informed counsel of the potential audio access rule change after the parties updated her on an agreement they had reached to allow specific counsel and the parties to watch the trial remotely so that they don't take space from the media and public in the courtroom, which has limited seating.
Plaintiffs' counsel appeared to welcome the news, but the proposed rule change drew quick pushback from Meta's counsel, Ashley M. Simonsen of Covington & Burling LLP.
Simonsen argued that publicly streaming the proceedings could expose the names of Meta employees, as well as confidential and personal contact information of company witnesses, which could create a security risk.
She also noted that Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl, who presided over the first bellwether trial in state court, was strongly opposed to live-streaming the trial proceedings due to the sensitive nature of the personal injury claims at issue.
For her part, Judge Gonzalez Rogers said the state trial before Judge Kuhl involved different personal injury issues than the negligence and public nuisance claims asserted by the school district.
Judge Gonzalez Rogers also noted that there is significant media interest in covering the trial, and that poses difficulty for the court since seating in the courtroom is limited. The judge added that "if there are rule changes, these proceedings will be streamed."
"We can discuss it, but I'm not sure I agree with you on this one," the judge told Simonsen.
The district's April 2 notice says comments regarding the rule change can be submitted via email to media@cand.uscourts.gov.
--Additional reporting by Bonnie Eslinger. Editing by Drashti Mehta.
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