The Virginia Business Litigation Blog
When specific and identifiable litigation becomes reasonably foreseeable, those likely to be involved in the litigation and with awareness of their likely involvement have a duty to preserve potentially relevant evidence. Failure of such a party to take reasonable steps to preserve the evidence–or intentional alteration, concealment, or destruction of evidence–is known as “spoliation of evidence” (often misspelled as “spoilation of evidence,” which is not a thing) and can result in severe sanctions if other litigants are prejudiced by their inability to use the missing evidence at trial. (See Va. Code ยง 8.01-379.2:1) Typically, the court will instruct the jury that it may (or must) presume that the evidence–had it been preserved–would have been unfavorable to the party who failed to preserve it. Sometimes, however, in particularly egregious circumstances, the court can dismiss the action (if the plaintiff is guilty of spoliation) or enter a default judgment (if spoliation was committed by the defendant).
Case in point: QueTel Corp. v. Hisham Abbas, No. 18-2334 (4th Cir. (Va.) July 16, 2020). QueTel brought this action against Hisham Abbas, Shorouk Mansour, and Finalcover, LLC, for misappropriation of trade secrets, copyright infringement, and other claims. The gist of the lawsuit was that Abbas–a former QueTel employee–allegedly stole source code from QueTel’s copyrighted software (TraQ Suite 6) and used it in a competing product (CaseGuard). QueTel sent the defendants a cease-and-desist letter in which it demanded that they:
- cease infringing on QueTel’s intellectual property including the source code underlying the TraQ Suite 6 software;
- cease all advertising, promotion, and sale of the CaseGuard software;
- provide an accounting of all sales of the CascGuard software made to date; and
- allow QueTel to copy and inspect a complete copy of all versions of the CaseGuard source code as well as any computers that Abbas used during the period from January l, 2014 to the present.