Meadows v. Allied Pilots Association, No. 1:17-cv-22589-EA, S.D. Fla. (Aug. 13, 2026), full opinion (PDF)
A litigant who can prove a device was wiped has proved less than he thinks. Magistrate Judge Lisette M. Reid denied two spoliation motions against the Allied Pilots Association on August 13, and the laptop argument at the center of the first failed even though the union agreed the drive had been wiped and reformatted.
Rule 37(e) reaches ESI that is lost and that cannot be restored or replaced through additional discovery. Where a movant does not establish that, the questions about prejudice and intent never arrive, whatever the responding party did with the hardware.
What Happened
Lawrence Meadows sued the union in Florida. After the case was stayed for several years, the court added a window covering conduct between 2018 and 2021 to the relevant time period for discovery.
His first motion targeted the APA-issued laptop of Ed Sicher, a former union president who kept the machine for personal use when his term ended. By the union's account, its technicians wiped the laptop, removed the partitions and reformatted the drive before returning it to him. Meadows also faulted the union for leaving Sicher off its litigation hold memos, and for counsel's statement that the union possessed no responsive text or Telegram messages during the relevant time period.
His second motion concerned a second former president, who Meadows said had deleted texts and emails between the two of them and had likewise received no hold notice.
The Court's Analysis
Rule 37(e) governs the preservation of ESI. Quoting a district court decision, the order treats the rule's conditions as cumulative, so that a motion missing any one of them must be denied.
The laptop argument failed because the ESI was never lost. As the court recited the union's evidence, emails and documents on the laptop would have been retained on APA's servers. They would have stayed accessible there for fifty years. In the court's words, "the information in Mr. Sicher's APA-issued laptop is still retained in APA's servers, thus, the evidence is not lost or destroyed."
On the hold memos the court found the union's omission of Sicher reasonable and not in bad faith. Sicher led the union from 2022 to 2024, and the court observed that his presidency fell after the relevant time period. The court added that bad faith could not be established in any event, because the union had taken reasonable steps to preserve the ESI relevant to the lawsuit, as its litigation hold memos showed.
Meadows's attack on counsel's statement failed on that same discovery period. The court found that the alleged false statements did not constitute bad faith, emphasizing the words that limited the statement to the relevant time period. The messages Meadows offered to contradict it ran from 2022 to 2025, and the one from 2021 appeared to the court to be coordinating a phone call, with no connection to the litigation clear on its face.
The second motion failed because Meadows already held the messages he said had been destroyed. He was on the other end of every one of them. In the court's view he presumably has them, so the ESI is not lost. Even assuming the union had failed to preserve and that the communications were lost and unrecoverable, the court found no demonstration of prejudice or of intent to deprive, because "Plaintiff was a party to those communications and therefore would have them anyway."
Why It Matters
A spoliation motion is won on the record of what became unavailable. Counsel drafting one should be able to name the ESI, identify the source it can no longer be pulled from, and explain why no other source holds it. On the laptop, Meadows described what happened to a device and stopped there.
Enterprise retention defeats most device-level destruction claims. Mail and documents governed by a retention schedule survive on the server when a laptop is wiped. The responding party's job is to put that schedule and the systems behind it into evidence, and nothing about the wipe itself needs defending.
A preservation duty reaches no further than the period the case covers. The court found Sicher's tenure fell after the relevant time period, which made the hold-notice argument weak from the start. Treat an order fixing that period as fixing the reach of the hold along with it.
A party will also struggle to show the loss of communications it was itself a party to. Before moving on deleted messages, look for them in your own client's files.
The full opinion is available as a PDF.
