While sought infrequently, death-penalty sanctions are a tool civil litigators should know how to use. These ominously named sanctions can put an end to a party’s claim or defense when it fails to fulfill its discovery obligations.
A lawyer may send discovery requests and expect the other side to produce thousands of pages of relevant documents and gigabytes of electronically stored information (ESI). But, all that arrives in response is a handful of irrelevant paper documents. The real evidence is noticeably absent, and the opposing party completely failed to produce the requested electronic metadata.
