USA – INDIANA Law and Practice Contributed by: Andrew Z. Soshnick, Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP
mediated agreement and are subsequently approved by courts. There is no statutory requirement for a party to engage in ADR. 3.5 Media Access and Transparency in Children Proceedings In Indiana, the media and press are generally per ‑ mitted to report on financial cases. Courts are open to the public. See Indiana Rules on Access to Court Records (“Ind R Acce Ct Rec”) 4 (A). However, if there are issues that would fall within the confidentiality of Indiana Code, Section 5-14-3-1 et seq and the Indiana Rules on Access to Court Records, adopted by the Indiana Supreme Court, courts may restrict access to proceedings and court documents. The statute addresses, among other things, trade secrets and confidential financial information (see Indiana Code, Section 5-14-3-4 (a)(4) and (5)). The act details man ‑ datory confidentiality, discretionary confidentiality, and the process of maintaining confidentiality. There is a process for filing mandatory confidential informa ‑ tion. There is a process for discretionary confidential ‑ ity that requires filing a notice and setting a hearing. If information is not determined to be confidential, the media and the press are rarely limited on what they can and cannot report.
There are two primary methods of seeking anonymity of proceedings. Parties may file a proceeding in any county in Indiana (subject to the other party requesting to move the case back to a more appropriate county) to try to limit ease of access. The “preferred venue” is generally the county where the parties reside. If a party files a divorce case in a non-preferred venue, the other party has the right to request that the case be transferred back to a county of preferred venue (see Indiana Trial Rule 75). Additionally, some counties and courts permit filings with initials or partial initials as opposed to full names. That permission is within the discretion of the particular county and court and, with the advent of electronic filing, sometimes within the discretion of the electronic filing service. Certain types of children’s cases have limitations on access to preserve confidentiality (eg, paternity actions cre ‑ ated after 1 July 1941, and before 1 July 2014, pur ‑ suant to Indiana R Acce Ct Rec 5 (A)(6)), but gener ‑ ally not divorce cases involving children, which are mostly open to the public. Personal identifiers such as social security numbers also are excluded from public access.
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