Bill of Lading

Bill of Lading as known as BOL is a term which is thrown around a lot in the auto transportation as well as other shipping and freight industries. It is a term workers in those fields employ on a daily basis but few know its meaning well, and it is a term few have heard of who are not in the freight business. Let’s explain.

The phrase "Bill of Lading" can be broken down into its two words. Bill which is a "schedule of costs for services supplied or to be supplied," and lading that derives from the verb lade. Lade means "to load a cargo onto a ship or other form of transport."1 This is pretty straightforward.

Now that we know what it literally means, it is rather simple to infer what a bill of lading actually is. A bill of lading or BOL is that which a shipping company sends to their transporter before the item they have been hired to transport is shipped. This is generally done as a mode of conveyance of the destination, time, date, and conditions concerning the item(s) being shipped. So in the case of auto transportation, a shipper will receive their bill of lading when the motor vehicle has arrived to the location of the auto carrier, and it will inform them as to where the car is being shipped and by what date it must arrive to its destination. This allows the company to verify that the item they have been contracted to transport is in fact the item received and that their transporter has the item and knows exactly what they are doing with it. Generally speaking, a bill of lading is not a document of title, but rather one of identity.

There are typically four types of BOLs, inland, ocean, through, and air waybill. The first two are self-explanatory. An inland BOL is for shipments on land whereas the ocean BOL is for shipments by seas. An item that requires an ocean BOL also requires an inland BOL since the item will touch both land and sea. The through BOL is for any export transports and the air waybill BOL is for any items being transported by aircraft.

Some form or another of the term has been used, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary since 1371, in use for police-like matters. It does not say, but perhaps for the transportation of prisoners or captive from one place to another. The oldest definition I can find is from A Law Dictionary, Adapted to the Constitution and Laws of the United States by John Bouvier published in 1856. In this definition there is no mention of air waybills because there were no airplanes yet. Also interestingly, the 19th Century description read that "the captain or master of a ship or other vessel…promises to deliver in like good order, (the dangers of the seas excepted,) the goods at the place therein appointed for the delivery of the same, to the consignee therein named or to his assigns, he or they paying freight for the same." It seems the "dangers of the seas" clause is a lot like that "act of God" clause issued by airlines in that both acknowledge that If god or mother nature or any extraordinary force becomes involved in their services all bets are off.

Featured Article Footnotes

¹  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_lading