Publications

On December 19, 2019, the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance (“Corp Fin”) replaced its existing guidance with respect to the submission of “traditional” confidential treatment requests. Corp Fin’s updated guidance follows up on the SEC’s March 2019 changes to several of its exhibit filing requirements in Regulation S-K to allow companies to omit immaterial, competitively harmful information without submitting a confidential treatment request. Although no longer required in most instances, companies may still submit a traditional confidential treatment request if desired. While the updated guidance is essentially a streamlined version of the prior guidance, it does provide an updated case law reference that Corp Fin suggests would be helpful in establishing that the omitted material is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. The updated guidance also applies to those filings, such as Schedule 13D or filings whose exhibit requirements are set out in Item 1016 of Regulation M-A, where traditional confidential treatment applications requests are still the only available method to protect private information in filed exhibits.