Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Bevisförstöring is not the name of an IKEA bookcase; it's Swedish for spoliation of evidence.


A federal judge recently ordered IKEA to pay $566,731.53 in attorneys' fees and costs as a part of sanctions for deleting employee emails in three consolidated class-action age-discrimination lawsuits.

Here's what happened. In April 2022, the court ordered IKEA to produce the email files of its chief human resources officer, global head of DEI, several store managers, and its recruitment manager. This production was to occur on a rolling basis and be completed by the end of 2023.

IKEA failed to produce a single email. In fact, it couldn't produce any emails because they had been deleted years earlier, after already being part of an earlier production order—a fact IKEA hid from the court and opposing counsel for months.

In its sanctions order, the court stated: 

"IKEA spoliated material evidence by deleting four mailboxes it had a duty to preserve.… IKEA was grossly negligent in its deletion of the four mailboxes and Plaintiffs suffered significant prejudice from the deletions. IKEA's conduct and strategy of delay and obfuscation since Plaintiffs first inquired about the deleted accounts in January 2023 displayed a lack of candor that is offensive to a court.… IKEA acted willfully and in bad faith to deprive Plaintiffs of key discoverable information, significantly prejudicing Plaintiffs."

In addition to the substantial monetary sanction, the court also ordered established in the case the fact that "IKEA had in place a common … practice … of favoring younger employees for leadership development and management level positions." That fact, established as true, should effectively end the case.

Preserving evidence is not difficult; it's way easier than building an IKEA bookcase. Identify individuals in your organization who have information relevant to the claim, instruct them not to delete anything, collect the information, and store it safely. IKEA did none of these things and learned this lesson the hard way.