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Responding to Litigation Hold Notices

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The purpose of a litigation hold is to preserve relevant information when an organization reasonably believes this information can lead to an investigation or litigation. The information to be preserved can be documents, equipment and/or electronic information or materials that may be relevant to a lawsuit or an investigation, depending on your industry. If relevant documents or information are lost, altered or destroyed, the company could suffer serious legal consequences.

The spoliation of evidence is “the intentional, reckless, or negligent withholding, hiding, altering, fabricating, or destroying of evidence relevant to a legal proceeding.” The maximum penalty for destroying or concealing evidence is either six months in a county jail or a fine up to $1,000, or both. For example, spoliation can occur when documents are shredded, emails erased, physical evidence is sold, destroyed or hidden and otherwise rendered unavailable for trial. It is the company’s duty to take all reasonable steps to preserve potentially relevant information.

The risk professional’s role is vital—he or she may be aware of an incident that might give rise to a claim or suit, well before a suit is filed, sometimes even a year or more. For example, if you receive an incident report that a third-party vendor fell on your property, you would call security to see if there is video of the incident, and if so, secure a copy of that video. You would interview any witnesses, preferably on the day of the event while memories are fresh, and document the incident in their words. If the victim alleges that something caused the fall, then you should take photos of location and determine whether the pavement was wet or dry, there was debris in the aisle, what the weather conditions were, and other considerations. Once you complete the investigation, all documentation should be stored and secured.

If there is a claim that is either in a lawsuit or the company believes could later become a lawsuit, the clock starts ticking on litigation hold notices. In the United States, the law requires that companies comply with their duty to preserve evidence. Evidence is broad and can include an automobile involved in an accident; emails; a chair involved in a slip and fall; videos, voicemail, photographs or text messages; among others. The notice can involve official company files, personal files or non-official files. All information that may be relevant to the matter must be preserved.

Preserving potential evidence that the company believes may reasonably lead to a lawsuit or investigation takes a coordinated effort that can involve legal, risk management, IT, HR, compliance, engineering, security and any other department.

If you are an employee who may have information pertinent to investigation or lawsuit, you would be considered the custodian of this information and would have a legal obligation to preserve such evidence. As custodian, the legal department or possibly a third-party administrator would instruct you to preserve the evidence. The general procedure is that you would receive a notice on a matter that could be involved in an investigation or a lawsuit. You will be required to review, comply, sign and certify a document that states you agree to preserve information that would be related to the event. There may be a requirement to return signed document within a certain amount of time from receipt, and violation may result in disciplinary action that can include termination.

The evidence required may be very specific (such as video recorded on this date), or general (like all related emails), and may include a date range. Once identified, do not destroy, alter, modify or delete documents subject to the hold notice. When the lawsuit or investigation is completed you will receive a termination and release of this obligation. The evidence may be saved as part of the company record retention program.

Risk management can play an important role in this process by storing the hold notice in the claim file, periodically reminding custodians of their obligations, involving and sending new notices for new custodians that might have evidentiary material, and notifying custodians of termination of hold notices.

Yeager Airport Added to W.Va. Chemical Spill Lawsuit

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A consolidated class-action complaint contends that poor management of a construction project extending runways at Yeager Airport created conditions causing runoff, contributing to the January chemical leak that left hundreds of thousands of West Virginians without water.

The West Virginia Gazette reported that in the complaint, filed June 20 in federal court, plaintiffs allege the airport’s runway extension project, which began in 2004, created storm water runoff that disturbed the Freedom Industries tank farm. This eventually led to the failure of the tank that leaked 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (MCHM) and PPH (polyglycol ethers), chemicals, mostly used to clean coal.

The chemical leak began on Jan. 9, when authorities discovered that 7,500 gallons of chemicals had leaked from an aging storage tank into the nearby Elk River.

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Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin issued a State of Emergency for Boone, Cabell, Clay, Jackson, Kanawha, Lincoln, Logan, Putnam and Roane counties. Up to 300,000 residents were affected and hundreds were sickened. Dozens of lawsuits have been filed since the coal-cleaning chemical contaminated the region’s water supply.

The complaint, filed by residents and businesses affected by the spill, states that, “erosion of the tank’s foundation and the increased water on the tank site and the associated process of repeated wetting and drying of the tank bottom, which resulted from the Airport’s runway extension project and the lack of associated or adequate storm water controls, significantly caused or contributed to the MCHM tank’s failure in January 2014.”

The new complaint also names Triad Engineering as a defendant. Triad worked for the airport on the extension project, which had numerous problems from the start. The complaint states that the airport and Triad “did not design or plan for any permanent storm water detention or retention structures following completion of the runway extension project.

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According to the lawsuit, storm water controls that were installed were inadequate to control the excess storm water caused from construction.

Texas Fires Back at EEOC Motion

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We normally pass, on blogging about briefs filed by a party before a court ruling, but Texas’ litigation against the EEOC and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is not shaping up to be just an everyday lawsuit.

This is a must read for employers. It goes to the heart of what the EEOC is doing these days, and how it is carrying out its duties.

Case Background

In April 2012, the EEOC issued guidance urging businesses to avoid a blanket rule against hiring individuals with criminal convictions, reasoning that such rules could violate Title VII if they create a disparate impact on particular races or national origins. Like various other states, Texas has enacted statutes prohibiting the hiring of felons in certain job categories. In November 2013, Texas sued the EEOC, seeking to enjoin the enforcement of this guidance, which Texas has nicknamed the “Felon Hiring Rule.” In March of this year, Texas amended its complaint to include more specific allegations of injury. For example, Texas alleged that the EEOC issued a right-to-sue letter to an applicant who had been rejected by the Texas Department of Public Safety after disclosing on his application that he had been convicted of a felony (unauthorized use of a motor vehicle). Texas claimed that the job involved “access to sensitive personal information for all 26 million Texans.”

Against this backdrop is a growing firestorm of litigation initiated by the EEOC over hiring checks based on criminal backgrounds. We have blogged about those cases and rulings previously (here, here, here, here, and here).

Earlier this month, the EEOC filed a motion to dismiss Texas’ lawsuit. In its motion, the EEOC offered three primary arguments. First, the EEOC contends that the U.S. District Court lacks jurisdiction to hear the case because the EEOC’s guidance is not legally binding and does not constitute a final agency action. Second, and in part because the EEOC claims its guidance has no binding authority, the EEOC argues that Texas lacks standing to pursue its claims. As the EEOC stated, “[t]he state may disagree with the EEOC’s interpretation of the law, but that does not imbue the interpretation with any legal consequences.” Third, the EEOC said the state’s claims should be dismissed because they are not ripe.

The State Of Texas Replies

In its brief, Texas started by pointing out other cases in which the EEOC pursued administrative investigations and lawsuits against employers and invoked its 2012 guidance. Making the point that the EEOC was attempting to have its cake and eat it too, the state characterized the EEOC as arguing that the guidance is “not worth the paper it’s printed on—even though it urges other courts to defer to it.”

Having set the theme, Texas turned to its legal arguments. The state argued that whether or not the 2012 guidance was a “final agency action” was not a jurisdictional issue, as the EEOC contended it was. Nevertheless, the state explained why the 2012 guidance in fact constituted a “final agency action” under the Administrative Procedure Act. Texas argued that the EEOC’s argument, that only those rules and regulations that were entitled to Chevron deference were reviewable, improperly narrowed the term “action” in a way that “no case from any court in the history of the Nation” had adopted. Texas also pointed out that the EEOC could not prevent review under the APA simply by re-characterizing its process in order to avoid judicial scrutiny under the Act.

Turning to the standing  issue, Texas identified three types of injury it has suffered, each of which independently established Article III standing, including (i) as an employer, the State of Texas is subject to the EEOC’s “Felon Hiring Rule,” and the EEOC issuance of a right-to-sue letter to an applicant denied a job after a criminal background check demonstrates that the state has been subjected to enforcement of the rule; (ii) Texas is seeking to enforce its right to participate in the notice-and-comment provisions of the APA, and the EEOC’s failure to comply with the APA had denied Texas its right to do that; and (iii) Texas has been injured by the EEOC’s purported preemption of the State’s laws. As evidence of this final injury, Texas pointed to the EEOC’s own website, which states that the Felon Hiring Rule “says that state and local laws or regulations are preempted by Title VII” if they cause a disparate impact.

On the ripeness question, Texas argued that, despite the EEOC’s attempts to recast its 2012 guidance as not requiring “individualized assessments” of all job applications, the case remained ripe for adjudication because it presents the “purely legal question” of whether “the State of Texas can continue to follow its facially neutral blanket no-felons policies …or whether the state must abandon those facially neutral policies.”

Implications for Employers

In defending against Texas’ case, the EEOC may have compromised future efforts to enforce its “guidance” against employers in Texas and other jurisdictions. To the extent the EEOC attempts to rely upon its 2012 statements as the basis for prosecuting disparate impact cases focused on criminal background check practices, particularly in cases where the EEOC alleges that an employer willfully violated Title VII, employers need only turn to the EEOC’s representations to the U.S. District Court for fodder in their own defense. Stay tuned for the upcoming ruling in this case.

This column previously appeared on the Seyfarth Shaw blog site.