A company that made asbestos products in the 1980s should have anticipated it would be sued, and therefore the destruction of dozens of boxes of related documents in the 1990s was spoliation requiring sanction, a Manhattan state judge has ruled.

Justice Peter Moulton rejected claims by J-M Manufacturing Company, one of the defendants in Warren v. Amchem Products, 190281/2014, that there had to be notice of a specific claim or pending litigation to trigger a requirement to preserve documents through a “litigation hold.”

“Every corporation which reasonably anticipates litigation must preserve relevant evidence,” Moulton said in a Nov. 9 opinion.