APPELLATE SUCCESS IN IMPORTANT SPOLIATION CASE

In a much-anticipated opinion addressing the issue of spoliation of evidence, the Kansas Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of our client, Ferris Kimball Company, LLC. The court held that no tort claim for spoliation existed under Kansas law for the plaintiff, Superior Boiler Works, Inc., against our client for having destroyed old business records.

Superior Boiler wanted our client to produce the old business records for Superior’s use in its defense of other litigation to which our client was not a party, but it had not subpoenaed the records at the time they were destroyed. This was a challenging and unfortunate case for our client, which had obtained a legal opinion that it could destroy the documents in question before doing so, but nevertheless found itself a defendant in a spoliation lawsuit.

Eric Barton, Ty Hudson, and Adam Davis represented Ferris Kimball Company, LLC, and its owner, who was named individually. After bifurcating discovery to focus solely on the dispositive legal issue, we obtained summary judgment for our client in Johnson County District Court.

Superior Boiler appealed. The Kansas Supreme Court accepted transfer of the case directly, as the court had not addressed the issue of tort liability for spoliation in more than 20 years.

We submitted a lengthy and thoroughly researched brief to the Kansas Supreme Court, drafted principally by Adam, and we were pleased for our client that the court adopted one of the arguments made in our brief and found in favor of our client.

The trial lawyers at Wagstaff & Cartmell stand by and stand up for our business clients, wielding our experience on both sides of the docket to help our clients mitigate risk and protect their business interests.