A Californian Judge has penalized Samsung for destroying or failing to prevent the destruction of e-mail evidence in its ongoing legal battle against Apple.
On Wednesday, Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal ruled that
“Samsung failed to prevent the destruction of relevant evidence”
He claims that South-Korean giant could have done more to save the evidence but it failed to oblige. This irresponsible move by Samsung led the Judge to grant Apple’s request of “Adverse Jury Instruction” and inform the members of jury that Samsung didn’t pay heed to the Court’s instructions.
Samsung has a history of falling into trouble because of their e-mail shredder. Samsung has a system where emails are deleted after two weeks time and Samsung didn’t take any measures to save the evidence (emails) pertaining to the case.
US International Trade Commission has ruled that Samsung behaved responsibly and instructed their employees to preserve the emails but the employees failed to follow the instructions. However, Judge Grewal thinks otherwise and explained that Samsung didn’t take extra efforts to monitor that their instructions were being followed or not. He said.
“In effect, Samsung kept the shredder on long after it should have known about this litigation,”
Samsung and Apple are going head to head in nearly 30 cases over 10 countries. Both sides have seen ups and downs but none has come out on top yet. Samsung managed to get the victory in UK , while tasting defeat in US and pretty mixed outcome in Germany and EU.