In the case of Traverse Therapy Services, PLLC v. Sadler-Bridges Wellness Group, PLLC, James Boulding-Bridges, and Haley Campbell (CASE NO. C23-1239 MJP), the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle, presided by Judge Marsha J. Pechman, denied the plaintiff's motion to compel and motion for sanctions. 

Traverse Therapy Services sought to compel the defendants to produce various discovery materials and sought sanctions for the alleged destruction of messages on Slack and Simple Practice, telephone text messages, and certain emails.  Because the parties failed to certify that they made a good faith effort to resolve the discovery dispute without court intervention and because the plaintiff did not provide clear evidence of a bona fide meet-and-confer effort as required by the rules, the court denied the motion to compel without prejudice.

Additionally, regarding the motion for sanctions, the court found that the plaintiff did not provide sufficient evidence of spoliation of any of the four categories of evidence cited. The plaintiff's claims about the deletion of emails, text messages, and messages on Slack and Simple Practice were not substantiated with clear proof of intentional destruction or relevance to the case.  For instance, the court found no evidence that emails were intentionally deleted, and the deletion of text messages appeared to be inadvertent due to an auto-delete feature the custodian was unaware of.  Similarly, the court found no evidence that the Slack and Simple Practice messages were relevant or willfully destroyed.

Ultimately, the court denied the plaintiff's motion for sanctions and their request for attorneys’ fees, concluding that there was insufficient proof of spoliation or an adequate meet-and-confer process.  Courts continuously look at the intent of the custodian surrounding the deletion of data and the prejudice to the requesting party created by the missing data when determining whether to apply sanctions.  This court certainly followed suit.

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