The case
Mosaid Technologies Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co. involved a patent dispute where Samsung faced spoliation sanctions for continuing routine email destruction after litigation was reasonably anticipated. The court in the District of New Jersey found that Samsung's failure to suspend ordinary deletion policies constituted sanctionable conduct, even though the destruction was automated rather than intentional.
What the court held
The court issued an adverse-inference instruction against Samsung, treating the continuation of routine deletion policies after preservation duty triggered as grounds for sanctions. The decision established that once litigation is reasonably foreseeable, organizations must affirmatively suspend automated destruction processes. Good faith and lack of intent to destroy evidence do not excuse failure to preserve when the duty has attached.
Where blockchain anchoring fits
The Mosaid decision highlights a critical window where evidence exists but preservation policies haven't caught up. Samsung's routine deletion created a gap between when documents should have been preserved and when the company actually suspended deletion. A SHA-256 hash anchored to Polygon and Bitcoin before that preservation duty triggers creates an immutable record that no automated policy can touch. The file stays on the organization's systems, but the hash proves specific documents existed at a specific point in time.
The blockchain anchor survives regardless of what happens to the original file. Even if routine deletion continues, even if preservation holds fail, the temporal proof remains on an immutable ledger. Courts can authenticate blockchain timestamps under FRE 901(b)(9) as evidence from "a process or system that produces an accurate result."
The takeaway
Routine deletion policies create exposure the moment litigation becomes reasonably foreseeable. You can't always catch that moment fast enough to suspend deletion. But you can anchor evidence hashes before the preservation duty triggers. The proof that documents existed lives independently of the documents themselves.
That's insurance against the Samsung scenario. The temporal proof survives even when the preservation process doesn't.
