A Taft Chicago litigation team, which included attorneys Elizabeth E. Babbitt, John F. Kennedy, and Nicollette L. Khuans, obtained a rare dismissal of a former Chicago Transit Authority employee’s retaliation suit against the Authority as a sanction for the plaintiff’s intentional spoliation of evidence.

On Aug. 7, an Illinois federal judge agreed to permanently toss the case and ordered the employee and his lawyer to pay the CTA nearly $150,000 in fees and costs as further sanctions because the Taft team demonstrated that plaintiff and his lawyer acted with “evasive tactics and dishonesty,” and because the plaintiff intended to deprive the CTA of relevant evidence. The sanctions were justified because the employee intentionally destroyed and failed to preserve messages he had sent his former supervisor through an encrypted messaging service, Signal, and his lawyer repeatedly misrepresented that his client’s phone had received a “complete” forensic imaging without ever correcting the record.

This case is one of only a handful across the country in which a court dismissed a case with prejudice due to the party’s intentional destruction of electronic evidence. The case is Pable v. Chicago Transit Authority, case number 1:19-cv-07868, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.