Protective Orders in Litigation

What are the limits of public access to the courts? In this Today’s General Counsel article, attorney Cristin K. Traylor considers this increasingly vexing question – increasingly vexing for two reasons: because the volume of information typically attached to a litigation has increased far beyond what could have been imagined when the concept of public access was established generations ago, and because information that formerly had to be accessed by a trip to the courthouse and a manual search of paper files is now more or less immediately accessible worldwide by way of internet search. “We need to strike a better balance between ensuring appropriate public access to court documents and protecting a company or individual’s private discussions,” the author says. “It seems unfair to force a party to disclose its innermost secrets simply because it had the misfortune of being sued, or because it sued another party.”