Unsealing Court Records After They Have Been Sealed

Answer:

We’ve had clients come in the past – in fact, a month ago we had a sit down with a client who asked about now that I’ve gotten our record sealed, can it ever be unsealed, or is it sealed forever? This was an important question we could tell that he was asking me. He wanted to make sure that since we went through the process, we spent the time and the money and the resources to get that sealed for the client, is it going to stay sealed forever? The short answer is it depends. It really depends on what the need is. In very rare events and only under a court order can that record ever be unsealed, so generally, for day-to-day operations, for his day-to-day living we told our client that he shouldn’t have to worry about the record ever just being unsealed for some unforeseen or unknown reason or just for some reason – commercially maybe a company’s trying to gather records from people who’ve had convictions. That can’t happen.

Once those records are under seal, they cannot be unsealed unless there is a court order, so if that time comes, what will happen is they will – whoever wants it unsealed for whatever reason will have to file a petition with the court, and they’ll have to notify our client of this petition, and then we can challenge that, but even in that event, it will only be unsealed for the very limited reason of whatever that petition is for. Let’s say that a client applied to work at a law enforcement agency or some other agency where that information would be important, then that record could be unsealed, but general day-to-day, that’s not going to happen. we told him rest assured that once it’s sealed, it is going to stay sealed unless a court order is put in place unsealing it for limited purposes. If you have any other questions about your record sealing or your record expungement and whether or not they will stay sealed or expunged, please contact the Victory Law Firm.