Pan NOx Emissions Litigations, Re
[2024] EWHC 1222 (KB)
The Mercedes-Benz NOx Emissions Group Litigation Aurora Cavallari & Ors v Mercedes-Benz Group AG & Ors
24 May 2024
[2024] EWHC 1339 (KB)
High Court
A legal fight over car software data. The judge ruled that the car company must share more data, saying they hid too much. The company has to review what they hid and share more, supervised by a lawyer, to help solve the case.
Key Facts
- •Claimants sought variation of January and March 2024 orders regarding disclosure of A2L files (related to vehicle firmware) by Mercedes-Benz.
- •Orders mandated disclosure with redaction of irrelevant material; dispute arose over the scope of redactions.
- •Claimants argued that redactions rendered A2L files unusable, citing examples of potentially wrongly redacted information.
- •Defendants argued that a large proportion of firmware was irrelevant and that redactions were appropriate.
- •Dispute centered on redaction of description strings, function names, chapter headings, and data from A2L files.
Legal Principles
In disclosure disputes involving heavy redaction, the court may adopt greater scrutiny to ensure the right to redact is not abused.
Matthews and Malek on Disclosure, page 208
Where there is doubt about the relevance of redacted material, the court has options including directing reconsideration, requiring further explanation, directing unredacted provision on a confidential basis, or reviewing the documents.
Matthews and Malek on Disclosure
A court will normally be satisfied by a solicitor's statement that redaction has been properly made, but greater scrutiny may be applied in cases of heavy redaction.
Judgement of Mr Justice Constable
In highly technical cases, the court may err on the side of requiring disclosure, providing confidentiality concerns are addressed.
Judgement of Mr Justice Constable
Outcomes
The court ordered unredaction of description strings, function names, and chapter headings from the A2L files.
The court found these elements were not confidential and provided necessary transparency for assessing relevance. The court also found that the defendants had taken an overly restrictive view on relevance in their redactions.
The defendants were ordered to review their redactions based on a more expansive view of relevance, guided by claimants' expert evidence and allowing for focused debate on potentially relevant parameters.
The court acknowledged that there will be some ambiguity on relevance but found that the claimants’ expert evidence needed to be given significant weight. The defendants' review process needed to be supervised by a solicitor to ensure compliance.
The court refused to vary the number of A2L files to be disclosed.
The court found that there was no basis to revisit the previous orders, considering the relevance of the files to the testing of homogeneity and representative nature of the samples.
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