Dallas Court of Appeals, No. 05-11-00935-CV (June 5, 2013)
Justices Francis, Lang, and Evans (Opinion)
Long after a case had settled, a trial court refused to enforce a pretrial protective order it had entered in that case to prohibit dissemination of information arguably covered by that order. The party seeking to prevent disclosure, ICON, appealed that decision. The Dallas Court of Appeals held, first, that the proper procedure for appellate review of such a decision was by way of mandamus, not appeal. Then, treating the appeal as if it were a mandamus petition and finding that the materials in question fell within the language of the order, the court directed the trial court to enter an order prohibiting disclosure of the contested information.
ICON administered the City of Lubbock’s self-funded healthcare plan. In 2008, ICON commenced a lawsuit in Dallas against two City employees relating to the administration of that plan. As discovery began, the trial court entered a protective order at ICON’s request, restricting the use and disclosure of certain protected materials and “all information derived therefrom.” Although not a party to the lawsuit, the City later became subject to the protective order in order to gain access to protected materials. In 2010, the parties settled their lawsuit and the trial court entered a final judgment of dismissal. Meanwhile, the City had commenced an audit of ICON’s administration of its healthcare plan. When that audit was completed, after the Dallas lawsuit ended, the City received open-records requests to disclose the audit under the Texas Public Information Act. The City informed ICON of those requests, and ICON filed a motion with the court in the closed case, asking it to enforce the pretrial protective order to prohibit dissemination of the audit, because it was “derived” in part from protected materials. The trial court denied that request, and ICON appealed.
Relying largely on the Texas Supreme Court’s decision in In re Ford Motor Co., 211 S.W.3d 295 (Tex. 2006), the appeals court first held that ICON had no right of direct appeal from the post-judgment order and that review could be had only by way of mandamus. The court rejected ICON’s arguments that the order here was in effect a final judgment or a denial of a request for injunctive relief. There is only one final judgment in a case, the court said, and the relief sought and denied was not for a new injunction but for enforcement of an existing order.
Rather than dismiss for want of jurisdiction, however, the appeals court elected to treat the improper appeal as a petition for writ of mandamus—a procedure the City agreed with, in the interest of judicial economy. Proceeding with its review under conventional mandamus standards, the court then granted the relief ICON had sought. Having found there to be no right of direct appeal, the court readily determined ICON had no adequate remedy by appeal. It then held that under the plain language of the protective order—which it construed under the same rules of interpretation as those applied to other writings—the audit was “information derived” from protected materials, and therefore its disclosure was prohibited. In so deciding, the court did not address whether the protective order should trump a statutory open-records request, but nevertheless directed the trial court to order that the protective order prohibits public disclosure of the audit.
