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You are viewing ARCHIVED CONTENT released online between 1 April 2010 and 24 August 2018 or content that has been selectively archived and is no longer active. Content in this archive is NOT UPDATED, and links may not function.By Eric Spada
A recent decision from the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania reiterated just how difficult it is for a party to obtain spoliation sanctions. In Flanders v. Dzugan, No 12-1481, 2015 WL 5022734 (W. D. Pa. Aug. 24, 2015), the Plaintiff brought a lawsuit against a local borough and its building code official for “alleged violations arising out of the building permit approval process.” Plaintiff filed his lawsuit in 2012, and as of Judge Nora Barry Fischer’s August 2015 opinion, “Defendants [had] never filed evidence of a litigation hold and it appear[ed] as though they never instituted one.” The Plaintiff consequently brought a Motion for Sanction for Spoliation of Evidence on the basis that the “Defendants failed to institute a litigation hold which may have resulted in a loss of emails relevant to the case.” Specifically, the Plaintiff argued that the 33 emails turned over by the Defendants could not possibly have been all of the relevant emails.