Jones v. Bremen High School Dist. 228, 2010 WL 2106640 (N.D. Ill. May 25, 2010) Despite receipt of plaintiff’s EEOC claim alleging employment discrimination, defendant failed to institute a litigation hold. Instead, defendant identified three individuals likely to possess responsive information and asked them to identify and preserve relevant evidence. Some of the individuals identified were substantially involved in the alleged discriminatory treatment of the plaintiff. Despite this failure, defendant eventually produced most of the requested information, although some email was deemed likely to have been lost forever. Finding defendant’s preservation efforts “reckless and grossly negligent”, the court ordered sanctions. Following a long period of alleged discrimination, plaintiff sued defendant. Defendant received notice of plaintiff’s EEOC charges on or before November 30, 2007, thus triggering its duty to preserve. Despite that, defendant failed to issue a litigation hold and instead instructed individual employees, some of whom had been accused of harassing the plaintiff, to identify and preserve relevant evidence. There was no evidence presented that their assessment was guided by counsel. It was not until the spring of 2009 that all employees were finally placed under litigation hold. Despite that failure, in October of 2008 defendant began automatically saving all emails from district users in a searchable archive. Accordingly, all potentially relevant emails created thereafter were preserved. Any email purposefully or automatically deleted prior to that could not be recovered, however. Prior to October 2008, employees had the ability to permanently delete emails from the system. To Continue Reading: Click Here ------------------------------------------- Source: ediscoverylaw.com

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