Protective Orders And the Rise of Corporate Secrecy

A recent Reuters Report, entitled “Why Big Business Can Count On Courts To Keep Its Deadly Secrets,” has exposed the decades-long lobbying push by large corporations to keep documents and other evidence produced in discovery—much of which is entitled to a presumption of public access—top secret.  The report notes how tobacco-industry lobbyists worked to change the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to permit increasingly expansive protective orders.  As the Report notes, this “turned protective orders into pro forma exercises to muzzle lawyers who might otherwise share pertinent information with regulators or the public.”  In turn, the lobbyists “succeeded in getting judges to routinely seal court filings, thus ensuring that when lawsuits are settled before trial, as usually happens in product-liability cases, the evidence remains hidden.”  This is particularly bad for the public because it stymies the free exchange of relevant information concerning, among other things, the public health of Americans.