Dallas Personal Injury Attorney Blog

Our courts historically are open to the public, not only in terms of giving every citizen access to the courts to solve disputes, but also in terms of giving all citizens access to what is going on in suits involving others. On any given day in Dallas county, there will be ten or more civil trials underway. Anyone who wants to can go into the courtroom, have a seat, and listen all they want. Every courtroom has a "gallery" area for people to do just that. Likewise, court records are open to the public. Want to find out if someone has been sued before, or divorced, or convicted of a crime? Those records are available to everyone.

Want to look at the court's file and see exactly what happened? That's a little different. There is a small percentage of suits that the public should know about but never will, and a greater number of suits where the court's records are purged of important information.

The two most common examples involve settlements and evidence. In a suit against a professional (doctor, lawyer, accountant, etc) where the defendant's reputation is important, it is the rule, rather than the exception, for settlements to be reached secretly, and the case to be dismissed, rather than any record being kept of what happened. Has your doctor paid settlements in 20 malpractice suits? There would be no way for you to know - county records will reveal only that he was sued and the case against him "dismissed." This makes it look like the cases were no good, when just the opposite may be true.

A common example involving evidence occurs when a product manufacturer is sued. Its attorneys will fight tooth and nail to prevent the disclosure of "smoking gun" evidence that proves that the manufacturer knew its product was dangerous and sold it anyway. In a lawsuit where the truth finally comes out, the manufacturer always seeks a "protective order" or a "confidentiality order" to prevent these documents from becoming public record. In this way, the documents are not available to others who are considering suing the company - and the company can fight against producing the "smoking gun" in the next suit.

Yes, this costs a lot of money: but it also costs plaintiffs a lot of money to fight for these kind of documents, and manufacturers know that usually neither plaintiffs nor their lawyers can afford the fight. If you can't get the documents, you can't make the case, and you lose. For similar reasons, defendants such as manufacturers and doctors often insist that any settlement reached be "confidential" - that is, that nobody but the parties knows about it - and sometimes insist that the plaintiff's lawyer agree to never handle a similar claim against the company again.

Defendants want these agreements so that the public is unaware of the amount and number of settlements involving them, and so any lawyer who sues them in the future will not have the benefit of the work that the first lawyer did. If the settlement were not a secret, and the documents were of public record, then the next lawyer who was suing the company would have a big head start, and the chances of the defendant making the suit too expensive to prosecute would be much less.

Of course, it would be impossible to argue that such agreements are good for public safety. The opposite is true. But they are good for business, and they may be good for the plaintiff in the particular lawsuit - who gets paid extra to keep his mouth shut and order his lawyer to do likewise.