(The Center Square) — A Georgia Senate committee has advanced legislation to allow high-ranking company executives and government officials to avoid testifying in cases if they have no direct knowledge of the issue being litigated.
The Senate Regulated Industries and Utilities Committee signed off on Senate Bill 200, the Civil Practice Act. It would amend the Georgia Civil Practice Act, effectively adding the “Apex Doctrine” into state law.
“This is not a doctrine that has a purpose of avoiding relevant testimony by people who have personal knowledge,” Emily Johnson, senior vice president and deputy general counsel at United Parcel Service , told lawmakers. “It’s really to avoid bogging executives down who don’t have personal knowledge of the facts at hand and where they can get relevant information from other means.”
Keith Blackwell, a former Supreme Court of Georgia justice speaking on behalf of Georgians for Lawsuit Reform, told lawmakers that such a provision would align the practice in Georgia with that of other states.
“If you’re a CEO or a high-ranking government officer, if you are subject to deposition in every single case in which your company or in which your agency is named as a defendant, you’d never get anything done,” Blackwell told lawmakers. “You wouldn’t have time to run the company. You wouldn’t have time to run the agency.”
Blackwell represented General Motors in a case that reached the state Supreme Court last year. In that case, the car manufacturer urged justices to adopt the “Apex Doctrine.”
“We conclude that, to the extent these factors are asserted by a party seeking a protective order, a trial court should consider whether the executive’s high rank, the executive’s lack of unique personal knowledge of relevant facts, and the availability of information from other sources demonstrate good cause for a protective order,” Justice Charles J. Bethel wrote in an opinion.
“However, we decline to hold that a trial court must find that good cause is presumptively or conclusively established in each instance that a movant has demonstrated that an executive is ‘sufficiently high-ranking’ and lacks unique personal knowledge of discoverable information not available through other means,” Bethel added.
However, Dan Snipes, the past president of the Georgia Trial Lawyers Association, disagreed with proponents’ assertions and said Georgia already has laws on the books that would protect executives from testifying in cases where they don’t have first-hand knowledge.
“It’s not being completely above board about everything to come in and try to compare this to every other state because Georgia doesn’t have a problem with this,” Snipes told lawmakers. “This is a solution looking for a problem.
“…Depositions of top-level executives should be rare, and they should be very limited,” Snipes said. “But this bill creates a burden-shifting mechanism that would make them almost impossible. And what it’s doing is saying that if the citizen needs to take that deposition, we’re putting another group of citizens above them in the eyes of the law, and that’s just not what we need to do.”
By T.A. DeFeo | The Center Square contributor
