Discovery: Oops — attorney sanctioned for deleting email evidence

Got this from the New York Law Journal, which rarely lets a non-subscriber “grab” any links.

This is about a lawyer who destroyed email evidence, i.e., discoverable documents, and the judge got mad: Attorney Sanctioned for Deleting Email Evidence | New York Law Journal.

Here’s a taste:

Finding an attorney’s destruction of email evidence was “planned, repeated and comprehensive,” a Southern District judge has sanctioned the lawyer by awarding judgment to his adversary.

Greg V. Wood, who has worked as a structured finance and derivatives attorney, founded a business that helped financial institutions meet regulatory requirements. When he and his business were sued for copyright infringement, emails that he was asked to produce in discovery were destroyed.

“Wood deleted every relevant email he could find,” said Judge Katherine Forrest (See Profile) said in Regulatory Fundamentals v. Governance Risk Management, 13 Civ. 2493. She said the evidence made it clear that “Wood purposefully destroyed documents to avoid liability. He did so knowingly and intentionally, and then tried to cover it up. This clearly constitutes bad faith.”

A big oops.

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