It is not every day you see lawsuits about insurance policies from 1986 to 1987.
Add Judge Paul Grimm’s powerhouse footnotes and you get a great lesson in document retention policies and litigation holds (plus a great footnote on the state of mind exception to hearsay for all the evidence fans).
This asbestos insurance coverage litigation was not filled until November 2012. As one could expect, there were significant gaps in documents from the passage of time. The Court stated the following regarding the destruction of documents in footnote 6:
Were there any evidence in the record to show that AC&R so much as had threatened legal action before the destruction of those documents, it might be sufficient to find that PMA acted improperly in destroying its documents and was not prejudiced by the passage of time. See Victor Stanley, Inc. v. Creative Pipe, Inc., 269 F.R.D. 497, 524 (D. Md. 2010) (“It generally is recognized that when a company or organization has a document retention or destruction policy, it ‘is obligated to suspend’ that policy and ‘implement a “litigation hold” to ensure the preservation of relevant documents’ once the preservation duty has been triggered.” (citation omitted) (emphasis added)). Because the duty to retain documents did not arise for PMA until after their destruction, it cannot be penalized for following its records retention policy.
Ac&R Insulation Co. v. Pa. Manufacturers’ Ass’n Ins. Co., 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 9063, 29-30 (D. Md. 2014).
Bow Tie Thoughts
You cannot sanction a party for following its normal document retention and destruction policy if there is no duty to preserve. Correspondence that took place during the Reagan years is highly unlikely to still exist as a simple matter of a company’s document destruction policy.
What will be an interesting question is litigation in the 2030s. Will electronically stored information on 20 year old external hard drives still be reasonably accessible if they still exist? Will such “old” information be proportional to the merits of a case? I only have to look at my old laptop from law school to imagine the challenge in recovering old civil procedure outlines.
My gut instinct is the answers to these questions will be “no.” However, let’s see what the future holds.