Opinion ID: 2708942
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The hard drive

Text: On May 20, 2011, then‐counsel for the defendants sent the plaintiffs over 1,800 pages of documents taken from a computer hard drive belonging to Richard Swiech. Counsel told the plaintiffs that the documents had just become avail‐ able. The plaintiffs reviewed the files and suspected that the production was incomplete, as the documents contained suspiciously few emails between the defendants. The de‐ fendants initially denied under‐producing, but they eventu‐ ally admitted that there were additional documents on the hard drive. The magistrate gave the defendants sixty days to review and produce the rest of the documents. None were forthcoming. The defendants eventually produced twenty‐ one CD‐ROM discs near the end of 2011, but the plaintiffs still suspected that the files were incomplete and asked the magistrate to order a forensic inspection of the hard drive on January 12, 2012. Two weeks later, the defendants admitted that the hard drive had been destroyed. Richard Swiech had apparently given it to Lewicki, who said that he had taken the drive apart and given it to his children to play with. The plaintiffs moved for sanctions in February 2012. In their motion they asked the magistrate judge to bar the de‐ fendants from using any of the documents taken from the 12 No. 13‐2435 hard drive and to order Richard Swiech and Lewicki to ob‐ tain the missing emails from their email service providers. The defendants responded with the revelation that the hard drive had allegedly crashed in 2009 and was then destroyed in early 2010. They claimed that Lewicki had used some “special software program” to recover some of the files—the twenty‐one CD‐ROMs that the defendants had managed to produce—before he destroyed the hard drive. This story did not hold up, however, as the twenty‐one discs contained numerous documents from 2010 and 2011—and yet the de‐ fendants claimed that the hard drive was destroyed in 2009. The magistrate judge found that the defendants had vio‐ lated their duty to preserve evidence, and noted that “much of the Defendants’ explanation for discarding the hard drive is incredible.” But the magistrate limited sanctions to a jury instruction on spoliation: she found the defendants’ behavior was grossly negligent, but not in bad faith. The plaintiffs again objected to the district court, and the district judge again agreed with them. The district judge pointed out the inconsistencies in the defendants’ story. For instance, the defendants’ lawyer initially claimed in late 2011 that she believed the hard drive was in Illinois and in work‐ ing order. Later, when the plaintiffs were seeking to have the hard drive scanned, the defendants changed their story and said that the drive had crashed back in 2009, never to be re‐ paired. This was inconsistent both with the defendants’ 2011 claim that the documents “had just become available” and with the documentary evidence they produced—which, if taken at face value, showed that the computer actually was No. 13‐2435 13 repaired in 2009.4 Moreover, the hard drive had been dis‐ cussed at numerous status conferences, but the defendants had never before indicated that it had been destroyed two years earlier. Taking all this in, the district judge reached the “inescapable conclusion that Defendants destroyed evidence and lied about it.” As such, she reasoned that a spoliation instruction was insufficiently harsh. Instead, the district judge forbade the defendants’ use of any of the documents taken from the hard drive and ordered the defendants to ob‐ tain emails from their email service providers. The district judge’s bad faith finding was reasonable. The defendants’ stories regarding the destruction of the comput‐ er were far from consistent—both the district judge and the magistrate judge agreed on that point. The defendants can only contend that the magistrate’s spoliation sanction was a sufficiently harsh response, and that the district judge abused her discretion by overturning it. But this argument again fails to account for the district court’s discretion in this area. The district judge certainly could have upheld the mag‐ istrate judge’s decision, but that does not mean it was unrea‐ 4 The evidence produced in support of this 2009 repair is itself hard to decipher. Richard Swiech produced an Apple Store invoice from May 18, 2009, which contained an estimate for a repair service to be per‐ formed on Swiech’s hard drive. Swiech also produced an Apple Store invoice dated February 22, 2012 (which was in the middle of the discov‐ ery dispute); this invoice included a handwritten note indicating that the repair had been done on May 19, 2009. If the note on the second invoice is genuine—the invoice does contain the same repair number as the May 18 receipt—then it undercuts Swiech’s claim that his computer was not repaired in 2009. Moreover, Swiech’s story is further undermined by the fact that some of the documents produced from the hard drive were from 2010 and 2011, which was after the hard drive’s supposed demise. 14 No. 13‐2435 sonable for her to conclude otherwise. Once the district court concluded that bad faith had driven the defendants’ failure to produce the hard drive, it was permissible to infer that the missing evidence would in fact have been harmful to the de‐ fendants. See Crabtree v. Nat’l Steel Corp., 261 F.3d 715, 721 (7th Cir. 2001). Given that, it was no abuse of discretion to grant a harsher sanction barring the use of any documents from the hard drive and ordering Richard Swiech and Lewicki to seek all of their emails from their email providers. Such a sanction appropriately mitigated the harm to the plaintiffs as a result of the defendants’ wrongdoing.