Roberts v. Christie’s Great Estates, Inc.

Plaintiffs moved for an adverse inference instruction sanction for spoliation after Defendants submitted 20,000 emails without the corresponding attachments.

The Court denied Plaintiffs’ motion for an adverse inference instruction. Under the Fourth District Court of Appeal’s spoliation test, Plaintiffs could not prove that the evidence existed, as Plaintiffs merely speculated that the missing attachments amounted to evidence of spoliation. Further, Plaintiffs did not show the evidence was crucial to the prima facie case, since there was still production of over 275,000 non-objectionable documents. Additionally, Plaintiffs could not prove that the missing attachments amounted to an intentional destruction of evidence.