Logistics
A legal document issued by a carrier detailing the type, quantity, and destination of goods being carried.
Sea-carriage documents sit inside a patchwork of conventions. The newest, the Rotterdam Rules adopted on 11 December 2008, was written to cover “door-to-door carriage that includes an international sea leg” and to account for containerisation and electronic documentation. UNCITRAL notes the development of electronic transport documents as one of the changes it addresses.
No definition of a bill of lading is quoted here. The page cited describes the convention’s scope, not the document, and older regimes (the Hague, Hague-Visby and Hamburg rules) govern most trades in practice. The description above is this lexicon’s working summary.
A Multimodal (or Combined Transport) Bill of Lading is issued when goods travel under a single contract covering more than one mode of transport — e.g., road from factory to Indian port, then sea to Rotterdam, then road to German buyer. The multimodal transport operator (MTO) issues a FIATA Multimodal Transport B/L (FBL) covering the entire journey under a single document. Useful for door-to-door India-EU shipments.
Bill of Lading (B/L): a negotiable document of title — whoever holds the original B/L controls the goods. Required for LC transactions where the bank needs document control as security. Original B/L must be surrendered at destination to release goods. Sea Waybill: a non-negotiable document — goods are released to the named consignee without presenting the original document. Used for open account trade between trusted parties. Sea Waybills process faster at destination but cannot be used for LC transactions.
From the AJG lexicon archive (July 2026).
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