Before U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced last week that the federal government might bring legal actions against opioid companies, Department of Justice lawyers were in court fighting over a drug distribution database that could aid ongoing settlement talks.

On Feb. 27, Sessions announced a task force that would consider “all available criminal and civil law enforcement tools” to combat the opioid crisis and assist local and state governments in their suits against distributors and manufacturers. He later directed the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to re-evaluate its regulations concerning the prescription painkillers.

But in court, DOJ lawyers representing the DEA were pushing for a protective order that would shield a critical database from the public, law enforcement and the cities, counties and states that have sued opioid companies. DOJ lawyers have spent months challenging the scope of a request from plaintiffs lawyers to turn over the database. In fact, a day before Sessions announced the DOJ's task force, First Assistant U.S. Attorney David Sierleja in Cleveland wrote a letter to a plaintiffs attorney in the opioid cases detailing a list of concerns about trade secrets, privacy rights, interference with law enforcement investigations and a potential outbreak of “large-scale robberies of controlled substances.”

On Monday, DOJ lawyers agreed to provide some of the database as long as a judge approved a protective order that would keep the data confidential. Lawyers are due back in court on Tuesday.

DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec declined to comment.

Plaintiffs lawyers Paul Farrell of Huntington, West Virginia's Greene, Ketchum, Farrell, Bailey & Tweel, and Peter Mougey of Levin, Papantonio, Thomas, Mitchell, Rafferty & Proctor in Pensacola, Florida, who have filed court documents relating to the database, did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Joe Rice of Motley Rice, co-lead counsel in the litigation.

Despite President Donald Trump's declaration in October that the opioid crisis was a public health emergency, the federal government has so far been absent from settlement talks that U.S. District Judge Dan Polster ordered in lawsuits brought by cities, counties and states.

That doesn't mean the DOJ hasn't been in court. On Oct. 30, U.S. District Judge Edmund Sargus, who was overseeing more than a dozen opioid lawsuits in Ohio before the MDL, authorized plaintiffs lawyers in the city of Cincinnati's case to issue a subpoena for the Automated Records and Consolidated Orders System, or ARCOS, database. The database, based on the reporting data of manufacturers and distributors, tracks 80 million transactions a year involving controlled substances.

On Nov. 27, the DOJ objected to the subpoena.

Before the dispute got resolved, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation sent the case and hundreds of other opioid lawsuits in federal court to Polster's courtroom.

In January, plaintiffs lawyers immediately pressed Polster for the database. Polster, a former federal prosecutor, agreed that the database could be important but also acknowledged the DOJ's potential concerns, particularly given the data's use in DEA investigations and criminal prosecutions.

“There is a legitimate need for plaintiffs to obtain this data,” he wrote in his order last month, “but the court believes that production must be tailored—perhaps through a protective order.”

Lawyers have spent the past month at odds over a proposed protective order, which Polster ordered both sides to come up with by Feb. 23.

One day before the protective order was due, DOJ lawyers met in Washington, D.C., with five plaintiffs lawyers, including Farrell and Mougey, and lawyers for two distributors, according to court records. Among the government attorneys were Alex Haas, chief of staff of the DOJ's civil division, and Mary Daly, who Sessions named the DOJ's director of opioid enforcement and prevention efforts that same week.

But no agreement was reached. In a status report, plaintiffs lawyers Farrell and Mougey said the DOJ's proposal was “problematic because the limited data would not allow the MDL plaintiffs or the court to identify the specific manufacturers and distributors that sold and/or distributed the prescription opioids into specific communities.” It also failed to provide the amount of opioids distributed in a particular state, county or city. The DOJ also insisted that plaintiffs lawyers not share the data with their clients, state attorneys general or the media, and raised concerns that identifying market share would risk competitive harm to opioid companies.

In their own status report, Assistant U.S. Attorney James Bennett and Sierleja, both in Cleveland, said the DOJ would provide a list of transactions identified by a “unique numerical identifier,” rather than a company's name.

After a Feb. 26 hearing, Polster ordered both sides to try again on an agreement over the database.

On Friday, government lawyers filed a motion for a protective order, which, if granted, would allow them to provide the data on a confidential basis. The DOJ agreed to provide a list of manufacturers and distributors with 95 percent market share, and transactions from 2006 through 2014, according to a status report filed Monday.

Such “a limited authorization to provide additional information to assist the court and the parties in attempting to reach a settlement in this case is in the public interest,” Sierleja wrote in an attached letter to Farrell. “Indeed, I believe that providing the information is consistent with the DOJ's own efforts to combat the devastating opioid crisis that is ravaging families and communities across America.”