A Manhattan federal judge on Wednesday appeared inclined to adopt a three-tiered approach to reviewing documents that remain sealed in a settled defamation case by an accuser of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, after an appeals court last month released an initial tranche of previously confidential filings.

The proposed procedure, floated by attorneys for longtime Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, would designate materials as "judicial," "non-judicial" or an in-between category referred to Wednesday 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 still-sealed filings in the closed defamation 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 a cache of previously sealed filings from the summary judgment record of the case, which was filed by Virginia Giuffre in 2015.

Giuffre, who has accused Epstein of holding her as a "sex slave" and trafficking her to other powerful men, said Maxwell had aided the dead money manager and alleged in the lawsuit that Maxwell had defamed her with public 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, however, cautioned that the documents were unvetted and had likely been filed for partisan purposes in contentious litigation.

The parties on Wednesday, however, were far apart on how to achieve that goal. Sigrid McCawley, a Boies Schiller Flexner partner who represents Giuffre, suggested releasing the files in "staggered form," starting with the back end of the docket and then 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, in fact, discussed the issue but simply could not reach an agreement. Pagliuca, a partner with Haddon, Morgan and Foreman, said "hundreds" of people were named in the documents under review, though the parties did not provide any details on their identities.

Pagliuca's proposed 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 briefing to be filed in two weeks.

Wednesday's hearing played out on just one of the various legal battlefields that remain following 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 has been dropped in light of his death, but federal prosecutors are continuing to investigate Epstein's friends, employees and others within his orbit. Some of Epstein's accusers, meanwhile, have sued to recover 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. Epstein's criminal attorneys have expressed skepticism at a medical examiner's determination that their client had, in fact, killed himself, and asked the judge overseeing the case to launch an independent inquiry.

If convicted, Epstein, who was 66, would have faced up to 45 years in prison.

Read More: