Opinion ID: 764886
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 9

Heading: Reilly's Cross-Appeals

Text: 73 Reilly cross-appeals the district court's denial of his motion for a default judgment and dismissal of his defamation claims. These cross-appeals are denied. 74 First, Judge Conti did not abuse his discretion in declining to grant Reilly the ultimate sanction of a default judgment and in determining that the lesser sanction of an adverse inference instruction was sufficient to redress NatWest's gross negligence with respect to the Deal Files. See West, 167 F.3d at 780. 75 Second, Judge Conti properly dismissed Reilly's defamation claims. The first alleged defamation arose from a conversation between Adams and Peter Hall, two of Reilly's superiors at NatWest, during which Adams allegedly told Hall that Reilly's performance was unsatisfactory. This claim was properly dismissed as a statement of opinion. See Williams v. Varig Brazilian Airlines, 564 N.Y.S.2d 328, 331 (1st Dep't) (criticism of an employee's work performance is opinion and cannot be defamatory), lv. to appeal denied, 573 N.Y.S.2d 467 (1991). The second alleged defamation also was properly dismissed. While plaintiffs are not required to plead defamation in haec verba, Reilly's unsupported claim that Adams said something bad about him to a client failed to afford NatWest sufficient notice of the communications complained of to enable [it] to defend [itself]. Kelly v. Schmidberger, 806 F.2d 44, 46 (2d Cir. 1986) (citation omitted).