Show me the financials
Partner Christopher Browning is quoted in a story in North Carolina Lawyers Weekly about Brown v. Secor, 2017 NCBC 65. The plaintiff, Michael Brown, had invested in the defendant’s real estate deals but alleged his $2 million investment vanished. The plaintiff received tax returns and bank records from the defendants, but they were heavily redacted. Browning says a “balancing test” on a case-by-case basis is required for determining whether financial documents are relevant and what information can be redacted. He is quoted, saying, “This is a difficult situation for which there has been relatively little guidance for attorneys in the trenches in terms of discovery disputes. On the one hand, if you have an issue with regard to relevancy, typically you either work that out with the other side or seek a protective order as appropriate. Then the question becomes, What happens if you have a document that has some relevant information but a lot of extraneous stuff?”