Despite its difficulty in application, the evidentiary spoliation doctrine—not to be confused with the independent tort of spoliation—is a fairly common sense doctrine at heart. Boiled down to its most basic terms the spoliation doctrine prevents parties from destroying relevant evidence and using its absence to support their position. The spoliation doctrine prevents parties from benefitting from their intentional destruction of evidence by allowing the other parties to make an adverse inference to the jury that the destroyed evidence would have been favorable to their position. (more…)