A federal judge appeared inclined Wednesday to adopt a three-tier document-review system in  a settled defamation case filed by an accuser of disgraced Palm Beach billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein.

An appeals court released an initial tranche last month after ordering the release of previously confidential filings, but other papers remain sealed.

The proposed procedure floated by attorneys for longtime Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell would designate materials as judicial, nonjudicial or an in-between category referred to as negligibly judicial.

U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska of the Southern District of New York said the approach would help expedite the process for determining which of the hundreds of sealed filings in the case against Maxwell should be made public and would avoid multiple releases down the road.

"I'm only doing this one time," she said.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Aug. 9 released filings from the summary judgment record of the case filed by Virginia Giuffre in 2015.

Giuffre, who accused Epstein of holding her as a "sex slave" and trafficking her to other powerful men, said Maxwell aided the late money manager and defamed her with statements disputing the sexual trafficking claims. Maxwell has denied the allegations.

The case settled in 2017, but the appeals court in July ordered the first release and directed the lower court to conduct a "particularized review" of the remaining sealed materials, which include discovery documents and motions in limine. The court cautioned the documents were unvetted and were likely  filed for partisan purposes in contentious litigation.

The parties were far apart Wednesday on how to achieve that goal. Sigrid McCawley, a Boies Schiller Flexner partner in Fort Lauderdale who represents Giuffre, suggested releasing the files in "staggered form" starting with older docket entries and working forward.

The disagreement at times seemed to frustrate Preska, who told attorneys, "It seems to me you parties should have had a conversation already" about what should be unsealed.

Jeffrey Pagliuca, who represents Maxwell, assured Preska that the sides had discussed the issue but simply could not reach an agreement. Pagliuca, a partner with Haddon, Morgan and Foreman in Denver, said "hundreds" of people were named in the documents under review, though the parties did not provide any details on their identities.

Pagliuca's approach would include grouping the documents by category and then arguing over redactions and other issues. It would also provide time to notify third parties if they were implicated in documents that qualified for release.

Preska, who emphasized speed and efficiency at the hearing, ordered the first round of expedited briefings to be filed in two weeks.

The hearing played out on one of the many legal battlefields remaining after Epstein's death Aug. 10 by suicide in a Manhattan federal jail while awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy.

The case against Epstein, 66, was dropped after his death, but federal prosecutors are continuing to investigate Epstein's friends, employees and others within his orbit. Some of Epstein's accusers, are suing to recover damages from the financier's estate, which is legally domiciled in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Two federal probes are also looking into how such a high-profile defendant could have been allowed to kill himself while in federal lockup after a reported suicide attempt. Epstein's criminal defense attorneys have expressed skepticism about a medical examiner's determination that their client killed himself and asked the judge overseeing the case to launch an independent inquiry.

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