Reveal Yourself: How One Overlooked Word Unlocked a Trade-Secret Win in Pennsylvania
Authors: Mathieu J. Shapiro, Melissa M. Blanco, Terry Mutchler, and Corinna V. Wilson
The strongest appellate arguments rarely read like arguments at all. Instead, they give the court a framework that allows the governing law to do the work. Once the court sees the case through the correct lens, the result often follows naturally.
The Commonwealth Court’s unanimous en banc decision this week in Scientific Games, LLC v. Tellerinio illustrates that principle. Representing a multi-billion-dollar international gaming company that provides analytics to lotteries in over 50 countries, an Obermayer interdisciplinary team comprised of lawyers from the firm’s Transparency and Appellate groups secured reversal of an Office of Open Records decision that would have required disclosure of proprietary lottery-validation data.
The decision is significant both for its impact on Pennsylvania transparency law and for the appellate lesson it teaches: effective appellate advocacy identifies the principle that organizes both the law and the facts so that the result follows inevitably.
That lesson begins with a straightforward observation: appellate courts do not decide cases in the abstract; they decide them through the language the General Assembly chose. So if the key to effective appellate advocacy is finding the principle that organizes the case, the search often starts with identifying the statutory language that actually drives the dispute.
In Tellerinio, that language appeared in the Right-to-Know Law’s protection for records that “constitute or reveal” a trade secret. Until Scientific Games’s argument in Tellerinio, no Pennsylvania appellate court had been asked to give independent significance to the statute’s use of the word “reveal.” But the word was there, and it had to mean something independent of “constitute.”
Once the appeal focused on that distinction, the case organized itself. The question was not whether the requested records were trade secrets standing alone. The question was whether disclosure of the requested compilation would “reveal” something the RTKL protects. That distinction supplied the framework for the entire appeal—including the factual background, where each fact helped explain how disclosure of the requested information could expose the proprietary patterns and structure underlying Scientific Games’ validation system.
Viewed through that framework, the path to the outcome became clear. Writing for a unanimous en banc Commonwealth Court, Judge Covey explained that the relevant concern was not isolated validation numbers but the requested compilation and what that compilation could reveal. Because disclosure would expose patterns capable of revealing Scientific Games’s underlying proprietary system, the RTKL protected the records regardless of whether any single data point was independently secret.
That progression—from statutory language, to framework, to facts, to outcome—captures an important lesson about appellate advocacy: strategic framing does not change the law or the facts; it helps the court see how the elements fit together. And when that fit becomes clear, the correct result becomes difficult to avoid.
Tellerinio is a reminder that appellate success often turns on identifying the issue beneath the issue—the statutory phrase, legal principle, or structural argument that gives the court a clear path to the correct result. Obermayer’s Appellate Group works with clients and trial counsel to identify those issues early, develop the record around them, and present them in a way that helps courts see how the law and facts fit together. The earlier that process begins, the greater the opportunity to shape how the case will ultimately be decided.
The information contained in this publication should not be construed as legal advice, is not a substitute for legal counsel, and should not be relied on as such. For legal advice or answers to specific questions, please contact one of our attorneys.
