Ballast Advisors, LLC v. Peterson, No. 23-CV-3769 (PJS/JFD), D. Minn. (Aug. 3, 2026), full opinion (PDF)
Ballast Advisors had already won a Rule 37(e) spoliation sanction against Scott Peterson and his co-defendants. The court had ordered the defendants to pay the fees Ballast incurred on two motions, leaving only the amount in dispute. Ballast asked for roughly $163,800. Magistrate Judge John Docherty awarded $88,350. Neither of the reductions that produced that number turned on the conduct that had earned the sanction. One turned on Ballast's billing records, the other on how far its motion to compel had ranged beyond the ESI loss.
Rule 37(e) sanctions reach only the fees the spoliation caused, as the court put the limit. What a movant recovers therefore depends on the scope of the motions it brought and on records good enough to document them. The opinion places that documentation burden on the party seeking fees.
What Happened
The court had granted Ballast's Rule 37(e) motion in part months earlier, shifting to the defendants the fees Ballast incurred on a motion to compel and on the sanctions motion. Ballast's request for the stronger measures available under Rule 37(e)(2) was left for trial.
Ballast then submitted its accounting, and the defendants opposed it. The hours were excessive, they argued, multiple timekeepers had duplicated one another's work, and the billing narratives were too vague to review. They also argued that the request swept in fees the loss of ESI never caused, and on that ground asked for an eighty percent cut, which they put at $20,954.40.
The Court's Analysis
The excessiveness and duplication objections failed. The court read the billing records as reflecting work that extended beyond the preparation of a standard motion. It found that counsel had divided the tasks among themselves rather than repeating each other's efforts. It also declined to reduce the award for the time Ballast spent preparing the fee accounting, which the court had directed it to submit.
The vagueness objection succeeded in part. Most of the block-billed entries carried enough detail for the court to tell what the time had bought. At least eight did not, and the court excised those, a reduction of $25,852 in attorney fees.
The larger cut came from scope. The motion to compel had addressed discovery outside the ESI loss at issue in the sanctions motion. In the court's words, "the Court must only award sanctions under Rule 37(e) for fees incurred as a result of the spoliation." Reviewing the billing records to identify what that motion had cost, the court excised half of those fees as fair and reasonable, taking a further $41,025.50 off the attorney time.
The court acknowledged that $88,350 is a substantial sum and that it retains some discretion over the amount. In the main, it observed, the figure comes from applying settled fee principles to the facts of the case. Among those facts, the court added, is that "the amount of ESI lost through spoliation was also large, and the ESI may have been highly relevant to the claims and defenses in this case."
Why It Matters
Fees follow causation, and the causation limit is the first thing to plan around. A motion to compel that pursues the spoliation alongside unrelated discovery gaps invites exactly the apportionment Ballast received. Counsel expecting to seek fees should bill the spoliation work under its own task code from the start, because a court reconstructing that division afterward will reach for a rough percentage instead.
Block-billing carries a direct cash cost in this posture. The entries the court could not parse were excised, and that reduction fell on the party that had won the sanction. Detail is what saved the rest of the bill. An entry that shows what a block of time bought survives review, and one that does not can be struck in full.
The court's parting comparison of the award to the loss suggests that a large sanction is easier to defend when the record shows how much ESI went missing and how relevant it might prove. That record is built while the sanctions motion is live, not when the accounting comes due.
The full opinion is available as a PDF.
