Court Finds No Spoliation as to Documents Produced from Backup Tapes because “Documents Were Never in Fact Destroyed”
Pitney Bowes Gov. Solutions, Inc. v. United States, 2010 WL 3278402 (Fed. Cl. Aug. 19, 2010)
In this post-award bid protest, plaintiff sought spoliation sanctions for defendant’s destruction of relevant documents. Although most of the documents were deleted and/or destroyed by their original custodians upon the order of the contracting officer, the documents were available for production from backup tapes. The restored documents, however, all reflected the same author in their metadata, causing plaintiff to doubt their veracity and persist in its request for spoliation sanctions.