Tag:Spoliation

Key Insight: Where employee ?at the heart of Plaintiff?s claims of discrimination and harassment? ?misunderstood the requirements of the litigation hold? and continued his practice of deleting all emails every day but claimed that he never received or erased any emails related to plaintiff?s lawsuit and that all of his sent emails were preserved (as were the emails sent to him from his managers because of their compliance with the litigation hold), court found the deletions were negligent and ordered an instruction that the emails were destroyed and would have been favorable to plaintiff?s case

Nature of Case: Employment litigation

Electronic Data Involved: Email

Key Insight: Where defendant?s failure to preserve potentially relevant surveillance video despite notice of plaintiff?s claim and a request for preservation was at least grossly negligent in light of the failure to implement a litigation hold, the delay between the request for the video and efforts to retrieve it, and the ?collective ignorance? of the people who should have know how the surveillance system worked (the time stamp was set for the wrong time zone resulting in collection of the wrong footage?a mistake that was not discovered until the relevant footage had been recorded over) and where the court determined that because of the grossly negligent conduct, ?relevance [was] determined as a matter of law,? the court ordered sanctions, including an adverse inference and payment of related costs and attorneys? fees

Nature of Case: Claims of discrimination on the basis of disability, national origin, and religion, assault, unlawful imprisonment, and denial of a reasonable accommodation for Plaintiff?s disability

Electronic Data Involved: Video Surveillance

Key Insight: Where a major question in the case was what defendant?s hard drive contained at the time it was returned to him and where defendant sent that hard drive to the manufacturer and received a replacement during a time when he was ?on notice? that the information may be relevant to future litigation, the court found that defendant was at least negligent in his handling of the drive and imposed an adverse inference which allowed the assumption that the drive contained the at-issue intellectual property at the time it was returned by the plaintiff to the police

Nature of Case: Action to collect reward offered for return of laptop and its contents

Electronic Data Involved: Hard drive

Key Insight: Where, for defendant?s alleged spoliation, plaintiff sought to preclude defendants from asserting a legitimate non-discriminatory reason for her termination which would result in summary judgment in her favor, the court found that defendants had likely breached their duty to preserve ESI but that plaintiff failed to establish bad faith or substantial prejudice and thus denied plaintiff?s motion

Nature of Case: Employment Litigation – Sexual harassment

Electronic Data Involved: Notes maintained on work or home computer

Key Insight: Where relevant documents were discovered upon forensic examination of a relevant hard drive and evidence indicated they had been modified, but not what the modifications were, the court reasoned that the documents had not been destroyed (because they were discovered on the hard drive) and that Plaintiffs did not dispute Defendant?s argument that the modifications could have been the result of merely saving the documents?without making other alterations?and thus declined to grant plaintiffs’ motion for spoliation sanctions

Nature of Case: Employment litigation

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Key Insight: Court noted 2d circuit?s rejection of premise that failure to issue a litigation hold constitutes gross negligence and declined to impose an adverse inference but did impose monetary sanctions for individual?s failure to preserve her own handwritten notes upon finding that she acted in a negligent manner in preserving those notes; court denied motion for spoliation sanctions against ?Roosevelt Defendants? (the District and the Board) for failure to preserve audio tapes that were contaminated with lead and asbestos while in storage and thus discarded ?through no fault? of the Defendants and imposed no sanctions for late production of relevant information

Nature of Case: Employment discrimination

Electronic Data Involved: Audio tapes, handwritten notes, miscellaneous

Key Insight: Where plaintiffs failed to take appropriate steps to preserve information, including failing to suspend their document destruction policy and failing to issue a litigation hold, which resulted in the destruction of relevant documents (but, as the court concluded, not ESI), the court declined to impose drastic sanctions but recommended that the jury be instructed about the failure to preserve (but not instructed to draw any inferences based on that destruction) and recommended that plaintiffs be ordered to pay $1000 to defendant to ?partially compensate? it for attorneys? fees incurred by its motion and to pay $1000 to the court clerk

Nature of Case: Breach of contract

Electronic Data Involved: Hard copy inspection reports

Key Insight: Circuit court found that the district court erred in imposing an adverse inference for failure to preserve absent evidence of bad faith and thus reversed the district court?s imposition of an adverse inference sanction

Nature of Case: Patent Infringement

Electronic Data Involved: Source Code