Hilda Fobb, Trinette Smith, Juanisha Winchester, Ravaughn Harris, Precious Diaz, and Quintosha Wishem v. Stericycle, Inc.

• Court: Louisiana Court of Appeal
• Decided: April 26, 2023
• Docket: 2023-C-0238
• Status: Published

Opinion

HILDA FOBB, TRINETTE * NO. 2023-C-0238 SMITH, JUANISHA WINCHESTER, RAVAUGHN * COURT OF APPEAL HARRIS, PRECIOUS DIAZ, AND QUINTOSHA WISHEM * FOURTH CIRCUIT

VERSUS * STATE OF LOUISIANA

STERICYCLE, INC. *

* *******

DYSART, J., DISSENTS

DLD I respectfully dissent from the majority. I would grant the writ and reverse

the trial court’s ruling.

Jennifer Hoisington is Stericycle’s Director of EHS Systems. She explained

in her affidavit that her duties include the management of the Safety and

Environmental Management System (SEMS). SEMS is a data management system

that Stericycle utilizes to track and report incident data for compliance and incident

prevention purposes. As such, its primary purpose is not for maintaining litigation,

insurance or claims documentation. SEMS is an external system, developed and

maintained by a third party vendor, AIC. Updates to SEMS were made by AIC in

approximately October 2018, June 2020 and February 2022. Following each of

these updates, some data concerning historical events was no longer available via

SEMS. Ms. Hoisington explained that the September 25, 2018 report regarding the

subject incident was generated from SEMS and then saved outside of SEMS as a

PDF before any changes were made to the SEMS data entry fields. Thus, although

some data is no longer accessible via SEMS, the evidence of the data has not been

destroyed, but copied and preserved in the September 2018 PDF report. That

report, identified as Exhibit” B” attached to defendant’s opposition to the motion

for sanctions, was provided to the plaintiffs by defendant in its discovery responses. As such, there has been no destruction, change or spoliation of

evidence.

For these reasons, I would grant the writ and reverse the ruling of the trial

court.