Law Vibe

Virgin gets hammered.

Virgin, label of Virgin Media, Inc., has gotten itself into some major legal trouble by not holding onto e-mails of 44 of it’s directors and executives in securities litigation. When the lawsuit first happened, Virgin sent out a document preservation order to the employees. Afterwards, the company filed for bankruptcy and was purchased by NTL Europe, Inc.

The Court wasn’t informed of the merger for a while and the judge was not happy about that, especially when he discovered that the purchaser had failed to retain all of NTL, Inc.’s e-mails.

The plaintiffs, when they found the lapse in document preservation protocol, they sought an order from the judge for an adverse inference and for attorney fees. When “adverse influence” is brought into court, this can have huge implications. What happens, is that when a plaintiff brings evidence on a point to their case but can’t do so because that document has been destroyed, the jury can infer that the evidence can be adverse to the other party. In this case, the jury inferred that the evidence would have been adverse to NTL, Inc. and they can then adopt the reasonable interpretation by the plaintiff of what that document could have actually said.

This is obviously a huge case-maker for plaintiffs. Moral of the story: preserve your documents or adverse influence may come back to hammer you later.