Ikea must pay $566,000 for “spoliation of evidence” after deleting the emails of at least four workers after the company had been ordered to preserve them, a federal judge ordered last week.
The alleged evidence destruction is related to a series of ongoing class-action age discrimination lawsuits against the company that began in 2018. In 2019, the parties associated with three of those lawsuits — Donofrio v. Ikea US Retail, Antonelli v. Ikea US Retail and Paine v. Ikea Holding US — “agreed to consolidated, joint discovery following the conclusion of their respective opt-in notice periods in those cases in an effort to conserve resources and avoid duplicative discovery efforts,” according to a court filing.
How IKEA obscured evidence
The court, in April 2022, ordered Ikea to produce electronically stored information, specifically the email files of the company’s U.S. chief human resources officer; the global head of equality, diversity and inclusion; and the human resources/recruitment manager — along with several Ikea store managers.
The furniture company’s attorneys said it would take eight months to produce the information; the court ordered Ikea to provide the information on a rolling basis, to be completed no later than the end of the year. By January 2023, however, Ikea had provided none of the requested emails.
Following “months of obfuscation,” Ikea lawyers “finally admitted” that the company had not done the required search and had deleted the email files of the key players in “the regular course of business, based on when that individual departed IKEA,” according to a letter provided to the court. “At the time of the departure, IKEA had no reasonable basis to believe it needed to preserve their email files.”
Still, as the court noted, “when read carefully, the explanation does not say that the emails were deleted at the time of the employee’s departure. Rather, it says they were deleted based on when that individual departed IKEA.”
Why Ikea had to pay half a million dollars
In May 2024, the court ruled that Ikea engaged in spoliation of evidence and had violated a court order. In a July 22 memorandum, the judge ordered Ikea to pay $566,731.53 in attorney fees and expenses, reduced slightly from the plaintiffs’ requested $644,646.64.
The cases are ongoing, with Ikea most recently moving to have certain claims dismissed. The plaintiffs’ age discrimination arguments center around allegations that Ikea’s corporate culture favors younger employees through leadership development initiatives, promotional practices and efforts to demote or push out older workers.
