Brian Flores Found a New Piece of NFL Hiring Evidence. The Fight Now Is Over Whether the Public Gets to See It.

Rapid Response / Legal Alert | September 18, 2026

Brian Flores’s lawsuit has spent years asking whether the NFL’s hiring system treats Black coaches fairly.

A new discovery fight is asking a different question:

What do the people who actually run those searches write down when nobody expects the public to read it?

Executive-search firm Korn Ferry filed papers on September 17, 2026, seeking to preserve the confidentiality of information contained in a document it produced in response to a third-party subpoena in Flores v. National Football League, pending in federal court in Manhattan. The document—described in earlier court-related reporting as a one-page record—was created in connection with a confidential coaching search for the Las Vegas Raiders.

Flores’s lawyers want the material public. They have told the court that evidence obtained from Korn Ferry is relevant to a supplemental pleading and have challenged the confidentiality designation placed on it. In an earlier filing, Flores’s counsel expressly argued that Korn Ferry or another party seeking continued secrecy bears the burden of justifying it.

Korn Ferry sees two different questions.

One is whether the information is relevant to Flores’s allegations.

The other is whether a confidential document generated during an executive search should become public merely because a litigant believes it helps prove discrimination or retaliation.

Its September 17 filing argues, in substance, that the first question does not decide the second.

That is the development.

The court has not ruled that the document proves discrimination. It has not ruled that it proves retaliation. It has not even yet ruled that the disputed information must be public.

But the fight over the document may tell us something important about where the Flores case is heading.

Public debates about NFL hiring usually begin at the end of the process.

Who got interviewed?

Who got hired?

Did the team satisfy the Rooney Rule?

Those questions matter. But discrimination cases are often won or lost on what happened before the outcome became public.

Who made the initial candidate list? Who was considered seriously? Who was eliminated? What criteria were used? What did decision-makers say privately? Were those criteria applied consistently? Did the explanation for a decision change over time?

An executive-search firm can sit unusually close to that process.

That does not mean the Korn Ferry document contains any of those things. Its contents remain nonpublic, and speculation about a supposedly devastating “smoking gun” should be treated accordingly.

What we do know is narrower: Korn Ferry previously told the court that Exhibit A concerns a confidential candidate search and was prepared as part of an engagement with the Raiders. Flores’s lawyers believe the material matters enough to their allegations that they want to use it in court.

That alone makes the document worth watching.

A third-party search firm may possess evidence that neither the league nor a team created for litigation. If contemporaneous records reveal how hiring decisions were actually made, those records can sometimes be more illuminating than testimony reconstructed years later.

The most useful witness to a hiring process may not be a witness at all. It may be the paperwork created while the search was happening.

There is also a useful procedural lesson here.

Korn Ferry produced the materials under a protective order and designated them “Confidential—Subject to Protective Order.” Flores’s lawyers were therefore required to treat them as confidential during discovery.

But discovery confidentiality and judicial sealing are not the same thing.

Parties routinely exchange sensitive material under protective orders. Most of it never becomes public because most discovery never becomes part of a court’s decision-making process.

The equation can change once a litigant asks a federal judge to rely on that material.

Second Circuit law recognizes a presumptive public right of access to “judicial documents”—materials relevant to the performance of the judicial function and useful to the judicial process. Courts then consider how much weight that presumption receives and whether countervailing interests justify secrecy. The stronger constitutional standard requires sealing to protect higher values and to be narrowly tailored to that purpose.

Pleadings themselves ordinarily sit near the heart of that public-access principle because they define what the lawsuit is actually about.

That does not mean Korn Ferry automatically loses.

Courts can protect legitimate confidential business information, privacy interests, trade secrets and sensitive third-party information. And the strength of the public-access presumption can depend on precisely how a particular document is being used. A document merely produced in discovery receives different treatment from evidence submitted for a judge to decide a contested issue.

So the real question is not:

“Did Korn Ferry mark it confidential?”

It is:

“Now that Flores wants to use it in federal court, is continued secrecy legally justified?”

Flores is not merely asking reporters to see an interesting discovery document.

His lawyers have indicated that the Korn Ferry material relates to a supplemental complaint involving newly accrued allegations. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 15(d) allows a court, on appropriate terms, to permit a supplemental pleading addressing transactions or events that occurred after an earlier pleading was filed.

That procedural mechanism matters because Flores’s original lawsuit was filed in February 2022. NFL hiring did not stop in February 2022.

If Flores contends later hiring activity supplies additional evidence of discrimination or retaliation, Rule 15(d) potentially provides a mechanism for bringing those later events into the existing litigation rather than forcing an entirely separate lawsuit.

Again, the existence of a supplemental allegation does not establish that it is true.

But it means the Korn Ferry dispute may be about more than an exhibit.

It may be about new conduct that Flores says occurred while his discrimination lawsuit was already pending.

There are several things readers should resist concluding.

First, the filing does not establish that Korn Ferry participated in discrimination. Korn Ferry is a third-party discovery recipient fighting over confidentiality.

Second, it does not establish wrongdoing by the Raiders. The document concerns a Raiders search, but its contents remain under seal.

Third, it does not prove Flores’s discrimination or retaliation claims.

And fourth, Korn Ferry’s desire to keep confidential search material private is not itself evidence that the material is incriminating. Executive-search firms have obvious commercial reasons to protect candidate information, internal assessments and client communications.

The significance is not that secrecy proves wrongdoing.

The significance is that Flores believes material generated inside a professional NFL hiring process supports his case, and the public may soon learn enough to evaluate that assertion for itself.

Executive recruiting runs on confidentiality.

Candidates often speak with search firms because they believe their interest will not immediately become public. Owners and executives may likewise communicate candidly because the process is private.

That confidentiality has business value.

But employment-discrimination litigation creates a countervailing pressure: the same private records that make a search process function efficiently can become highly probative when someone later alleges that the process was discriminatory.

That is the broader tension.

Search firms are hired to operate behind the scenes. Litigation can turn the behind-the-scenes record into the most important record in the case.

For NFL teams—and sophisticated employers generally—that is the practical lesson. Outsourcing a search does not outsource the evidentiary trail.

The immediate issue is whether the court permits the disputed material to remain sealed or requires some or all of it to become public.

That decision may be incremental. Courts frequently use targeted redactions rather than choosing between total secrecy and total disclosure.

The larger issue is what Flores actually alleges based on the document and whether those allegations survive subsequent challenges.