Alabama Supreme Court: Protective Orders Appropriate for Bills of Lading, but not Commercial Transportation Safety and Operations Manuals
by Edgar M. Elliott IV, Partner
The production of documents by a trucking company often raises concerns about the use of those documents by plaintiffs outside the scope of the lawsuit at hand. On March 2, 2018, the Alabama Supreme Court addressed whether a trucking company is entitled to a protective order that limits the use of bills of lading and operations and safety manuals to the specific lawsuit where they are produced.
In Ex Parte Industrial Warehouse Services, 2018 WL 1126576 (Ala. 2018), the Plaintiffs wanted the ability to not only use the bills of lading and manuals produced by the trucking company in the subject lawsuit, but also to use them in future litigation against that company and to share the discovered information with other plaintiffs’ attorneys. The Court held that a trucking company was entitled to a protective order limiting the use of bills of lading because the bills of lading were subject to confidentiality agreements and could be used by competitors to identify customers, pricing, logistics, rates of transportation, type of freight, how much freight is being hauled, and the frequency of shipments.
The Court, however, declined to extend that same protection to operations and safety manuals. The operations and safety manuals were not entitled to protection because the trucking company did not establish that those documents constituted trade secrets. Specifically, the Court relied on the fact that the manuals were in part based on regulations applicable to the entire trucking industry and were so readily ascertained from publicly available information.