....I cannot let people be misinformed.
I have either alluded to this or stated it directly in prior posts long ago, but based on my 26+ years of representing large corporations, the vast majority of them always request confidentiality clauses (CCs, or what some here refer to as NDAs) regardless of the amount of the settlement. This is especially true in matters involving multinational companies presenting proprietary data issues, such as products liability design defect cases and other such situations. Sure, you will find exceptions, even cases, such as we have seen recently, in which all of the terms of the settlement are actually announced --- however, it is error to assume that we can determine who "got the better deal" in our settlement merely due to the existence of a CC.
For those companies that require CCs as a matter of routine, they obviously do not want "big dollars" disclosed. However, there are many small companies out there that would love to get a few hundred thousand dollars, or a few million dollars, in settlement merely by filing a lawsuit --- thus, the mindset is that, by disclosing any numbers, even if considered "small" by the payor, the litigation floodgates may be opened even wider.
The requirement of not allowing a PR at all by the recipient of the money follows similar logic. In other words, if you are not going to allow any numbers, why allow anything? A creative PR department can do just as much, if not more, damage by putting out a "David v. Goliath" message that contains no numbers, than if they issue such a release that contains numbers which might be deemed "small" by the payor.
In summary, disclosures of this type are viewed as "darned if you do, darned if you don't" by many companies. They don't want to look like they got their butts kicked if they paid what they consider big bucks, but they also don't want to invite more lawsuits by disclosing that that they were willing to settle for what they consider peanuts, because they then send a message that they will pay something just to avoid a trial. And if they aren't going to allow either of those, they certainly can't allow the overly creative "no sum, but say anything else" type of PR.
Having said the above, I don't mean to imply that our settlement with the J3 was large or small --- I don't know one way or the other. The point is that, as above, we cannot make any intelligent deduction based solely on the fact that a CC was included.
