Barbera v. Pearson Education, Inc.
- Court
- Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (Federal circuit court)
- Decided
- 2018
- Citation
- 906 F.3d 621 (7th Cir. 2018)
- Standard applied
- FRCP 37(e)(1) — measures no greater than necessary to cure prejudice
What the court held
Where an employer lost a key e-mail exchange, the magistrate judge cured the prejudice by barring the employer from disputing the plaintiff's description of the messages, and declined to grant further sanctions. The Seventh Circuit affirmed: the district court properly overruled the objection to that remedy and, accepting the plaintiff's version of the missing e-mails, correctly granted summary judgment because the proposed comparators were not similarly situated.
Why
The court treated the curative measure as an adequate answer to the loss under Rule 37(e)(1), and then tested whether the plaintiff's claim survived on her own account of the lost messages. Because it did not, the argument for harsher sanctions could not change the outcome — the case failed on the merits even with the spoliation resolved entirely in her favour.
Our reading — not the court’s words
Why this matters in practice
Barbera illustrates the most common and least dramatic Rule 37(e)(1) remedy: the court simply accepts the aggrieved party's description of what was lost. It also shows the limit of a spoliation strategy — a curative measure that gives you the content you say was destroyed leaves you having to win on that content. Before investing in a sanctions motion, it is worth asking whether the case is won if the motion succeeds completely.
This paragraph is Legal Cyber Academy’s editorial assessment of the decision’s practical importance. The court said none of it. For what the court actually said, read the opinion.
Additional detail
Tags: Rule 37(e)(1) · curative measure · e-mail · summary judgment
Cited 154times in CourtListener’s corpus at the time this entry was compiled. Treat it as a rough measure of influence, not of correctness.
Other decisions on spoliation & sanctions
- Pegasus Aviation I, Inc. v. Varig Logistica S.A.New York Court of Appeals · 2015A party's failure to institute a litigation hold is not gross negligence per se; it is one factor among many in assessing the spoliator's culpable state of mind…
- Victor Stanley, Inc. v. Creative Pipe, Inc.District Court, D. Maryland · 2010After finding a sustained pattern of deletion, use of wiping software, and failure to preserve devices, the court granted the sanctions motion in part: it recom…
- Brookshire Brothers, Ltd. v. AldridgeTexas Supreme Court · 2014A spoliation analysis is a two-step judicial process: the trial court decides as a question of law whether a party spoliated evidence, and if so assesses an app…
- Rimkus Consulting Group, Inc. v. CammarataDistrict Court, S.D. Texas · 2010The court granted the sanctions motion in part: the jury would hear evidence of the defendants' deletion of e-mails and attachments and of their inconsistent te…
- Goodman v. Praxair Services, Inc.District Court, D. Maryland · 2009The court found a breach of the duty to preserve relevant e-mail and documents and imposed a permissive adverse-inference instruction — one allowing but not req…
- Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC (Zubulake V)District Court, S.D. New York · 2004The court imposed sanctions on UBS for failing to preserve and produce relevant e-mail, including an adverse-inference instruction as to messages deleted after…
Summarised from the opinion as retrieved from CourtListener. Reference material, not legal advice. Back to the repository.