Tag:Motion for Sanctions

Key Insight: Court granted motion for sanctions and ordered an adverse inference for trial where defendant was grossly negligent in its destruction of relevant emails (as proven by Plaintiff?s receipt of relevant emails from third parties that should have been in defendant?s possession, for example, and defendant?s failure to dispute the existence of certain emails which were relevant to plaintiff?s claims but which were not produced); court found defendant was ?at least negligent? in its failure to preserve (and later found that defendant was grossly negligent) where the city had no formal email retention policy and instead relied on its employees to determine what to save: ?Because the City has effectively conceded that it had a duty to preserve the e-mails in question, its failure to maintain a formal e-mail retention policy was at least negligent.?

Nature of Case: Violation of constitutionally protected property rights based on Stop Work Order

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Key Insight: Reviewing District Court?s denial of spoliation sanctions for abuse of discretion, Circuit Court found that the at-issue information should have been preserved and was intentionally destroyed but upheld the denial of sanctions based on plaintiffs? inability to establish relevance, a necessary element of the test for determining whether sanctions are appropriate

Nature of Case: Employment discrimination

Electronic Data Involved: ESI (Survey results)

Key Insight: Where plaintiff recycled the at-issue computer after being notified that Allstate disputed the effective date of her cancellation (which may have been discernible from examination of the computer) but before it was formally requested in discovery (almost two years later), court questioned whether a lay person would have known to keep her computer because of potential litigation when the computer was not the subject of her claim and declined to dismiss her claims but indicated that it would entertain further motions practice on the issue closer to trial

Nature of Case: Breach of contract, bad faith

Electronic Data Involved: Personal Computer

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: Court denied motion for sanctions for defendant?s alleged destruction of video tape and hard copy where, as to the video tape, the court determined that defendant ?could not reasonably have known? that it had an obligation to preserve the at-issue video at the time it was destroyed, and that no sanctions were therefore merited and where, as to the hard copy documents, the plaintiff was unable to establish that the at-issue documents actually existed or that, if they did, they were destroyed with the requisite culpable state of mind (where the alleged spoliation resulted from a broken sprinkler which flooded a storage room), and where even if defendant had been negligent, plaintiff could not establish that the allegedly destroyed evidence was relevant to his claims

Nature of Case: Personal injury arising from alleged elevator accident

Electronic Data Involved: Video, hard copy

Key Insight: Court denied motion for spoliation without prejudice where plaintiffs ?demonstrated only a suspicion of prejudice and have not been able to establish bad faith conduct on the part of the Defendant?

Nature of Case: Employment Discrimination

Electronic Data Involved: ESI, email, metadata related to excel spreadsheet

Key Insight: Appellate court found that trial court did not err in failing to grant Plaintiff?s request for an adverse presumption for insurance company?s failure to preserve a relevant file that was instead purged pursuant to the company?s document retention policy where Plaintiff provided no evidence of fraudulent conduct or intentional destruction; court further noted that Plaintiff failed to explain how the failure to provide an adverse inference (a lesser sanction than an adverse presumption) altered the court?s ?summary disposition analysis? reasoning that the court was already required to consider the evidence in the light most favorable to the non-moving party

Nature of Case: Claims arising from a slip and fall involving questions related to insurance coverage

Electronic Data Involved: Underwriting file