Ferrara Bros. Building Materials Corp. v. FMC Construction LLC

What happened

The parties disputed the date and authenticity of a key contract central to a construction materials claim. The plaintiff sought to compel production of metadata from the defendant's computer systems that would have revealed when the contract file was actually created and last modified. The defendant failed to preserve the electronically stored information and either destroyed or withheld the metadata. The court found that the defendant had not met its preservation obligations and issued an adverse-inference instruction: the jury was directed to assume that the destroyed or withheld metadata would have been unfavourable to the defendant. The case is a clean example of how the absence of verifiable metadata, through either deliberate deletion or failure to preserve, is treated almost as unfavourably as metadata that directly proves fabrication. A blockchain-anchored creation timestamp would have resolved the dispute immediately and made spoliation impossible: the hash would have existed on the public ledger regardless of what happened to the file on the defendant's systems.