It was a tragedy. The 1977 plane crash that killed Ronnie Van Zant and Steven Gaines almost ended the band Lynyrd Skynyrd forever. In the wake of the crash, the survivors swore an oath never again to perform as “Lynyrd Skynyrd.” That oath made its way to court where it would be memorialized in a 1988 Consent Order outlining how and when surviving members could use the name “Lynyrd Skynyrd.” In 2016, Cleopatra Records and its affiliate film studio Cleopatra Films (together “Cleopatra”) hired a writer, Jared Cohn, to write and direct a screenplay about the plane crash. The studio secured the cooperation of one of the band’s few surviving members, Artimus Pyle. Other heirs to the Lynyrd Skynyrd name, including members of the Van Zant family and original band member Gary Rossington, did not approve and threatened Cleopatra with legal action based on Mr. Pyle’s involvement. Cleopatra and the Van Zants traded barbs, while Cleopatra distanced itself from Pyle to try and get around the 1988 Consent Order. The two sides could not resolve their disagreement and in May 2017, the Van Zants and others sued to block distribution of the film.
Behind this headline drama, a creeping legal problem was unfolding: allegations of lost documentary evidence. Artimus Pyle helped Cleopatra and Cohn with the film script. But Pyle did not have a computer, so he conducted all his business on his phone, through calls and texts. He and Cohn traded texts discussing the film, but the court would never see these texts. Plaintiffs did not name Mr. Cohn as a defendant; rather they issued him a subpoena. And sometime between the filing of the case, his subpoena, and his deposition, Mr. Cohn got a new phone. He saved and transferred his photos to his new phone, but not his texts.
The plaintiffs argued they were entitled to an adverse inference because Cohn had deliberately destroyed his text messages after getting a subpoena. These...
