Toyota Motor Corp lost a key courtroom skirmish with product-liability lawyers on Wednesday over rules for safeguarding its trade secrets in litigation stemming from complaints about its cars racing out of control.
The judge presiding over the cases rejected Toyota's request to bar any confidential information it produces in pretrial proceedings from being disclosed to outside experts or consultants on the plaintiffs' legal team if those experts had worked for a rival car company in the past year.
Toyota sought the exclusion as part of a protective order the judge will issue sealing from the public record any proprietary information that may compromise Toyota's competitive position during the so-called discovery process.
Plaintiff's lawyers argued Toyota's request would have gone too far, hampering their ability to hire top-rate automobile industry engineers and other experts as they pursue scores of personal-injury and consumer class-action claims against the Japanese carmaker.
"This is a very limited area of expertise," plaintiffs lawyer Mark Robinson said during a two-hour hearing that dealt mostly with procedural issues. "Most of these are people who have worked for other companies."
U.S. District Judge James Selna agreed, saying he saw no reason why former employees of other car companies could not be made privy to confidential material as experts for the plaintiffs without exposing Toyota's trade secrets.
But Selna granted Toyota's request to generally exclude current employees of Toyota's competitors, whom he said "by definition have divided loyalties."
He also agreed to establish a separate, more restrictive order safeguarding Toyota's computer source code, which the company called the "crown jewel" of its intellectual property.
The next hearing in was tentatively set for July 20.
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