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Appellate Court Ruling Outlines Limits to SAR Confidentiality in Civil Cases

By Kira Zalan

Legal safeguards intended to comfort banks when reporting suspicious client activity do not extend to instances when third-party litigants obtain sensitive compliance data on their own, according to an appellate court. In a ruling late last month, the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals found that JPMorgan Chase could not prevent plaintiffs from citing compliance data that they had obtained "through a convoluted course of events" outside of the bank's control. The information does not fall under the definition of protected data and, even if it did, would no longer be considered confidential, the court said. Although U.S. statutes and...

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