Brown v. Albertsons, LLC, 2:16-cv-01991-JAD-PAL, 2017 WL 1957571 (D. Nev. May 10, 2017)

Key Insight: In response to Plaintiff?s Motion for Spoliation Sanctions, the Court engaged in an analysis of four types of available sanctions: Evidentiary, Monetary, Dispositive and Adverse Inference Instructions. The Plaintiff argued the Defendant intentionally destroyed evidence in the form of an incident report, a surveillance video and correspondence between Defendant and a third-party claims adjuster. The Court found that information from the incident report and the lost emails with the claims adjuster were available elsewhere and that the loss of the video surveillance was due to a system-wide outage that affected several stores. The Court found no evidence that Defendant acted intentionally or recklessly and denied Plaintiff?s request for Dispositive Sanctions but instead imposed lesser Evidentiary Sanctions by allowing the Plaintiff to introduce evidence that the incident report was lost or destroyed, that the Defendant failed to preserve the third-party communications and that Defendant?s video system failed to record the incident.

Nature of Case: Slip and Fall

Electronic Data Involved: ESI, including video