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On January 21, 2025, Delaware’s Court of Chancery sanctioned former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg in a shareholder lawsuit over the failure to preserve potentially relevant messages in her personal Gmail account. The judge raised the proof standard for her affirmative defenses and ordered her to pay plaintiffs’ expenses tied to the sanctions issue. This was a civil discovery ruling—not a criminal conviction—and the court did not impose the same sanction on co-defendant Jeffrey Zients.
Why was Sheryl Sandberg sanctioned?
The sanction came in In re Facebook Inc. Derivative Litigation, a shareholder derivative case arising from Facebook’s handling and oversight of matters connected to the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. The sanctions decision addressed preservation of evidence in that lawsuit; it was not a final decision on every allegation in the underlying dispute.
The court found that Sandberg’s personal Gmail account, maintained under a pseudonym, had been used for communications potentially relevant to the claims and defenses. After the scandal became public, she received a legal hold requiring her to preserve potentially pertinent evidence. The court found she had an obligation to preserve the emails but did not take reasonable steps to do so.
The record described a practice of regularly deleting messages older than 30 days. The judge said counsel’s failure to provide a straight answer about that practice supported an inference that Sandberg was choosing which messages to delete rather than relying on an automatic deletion function. That was the court’s inference in assessing preservation—not a criminal finding, and not a finding that every deleted message was relevant.
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What did the sanction change?
Sandberg’s affirmative defenses now carry a higher evidentiary burden: where she bears the burden of proof, she must establish an issue by clear and convincing evidence rather than the ordinary preponderance standard. The court also awarded plaintiffs the expenses they incurred pursuing the spoliation issue against her.
The judge did not bar Sandberg from testifying about communications in her personal account and did not rule out a future summary-judgment motion in advance. The remedy was not a default judgment.
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What emails were involved, and what is not established?
The opinion describes potentially relevant communications in Sandberg’s personal Gmail account and a recurring deletion practice. It does not establish that all of her email was lost or that every deleted email was responsive to the litigation.
For scale, the court’s 2025 opinion described discovery involving more than 1.7 million documents and more than 8.9 million pages, collected from 32 custodians. Defense counsel reviewed approximately 3,800 emails from Sandberg’s Gmail account, and 57 emails in the record were also sent to or from that account. These are figures about the record and review described in this case, not counts of the emails deleted.
Why was Jeffrey Zients not sanctioned?
The court found that Zients failed to take reasonable steps by leaving an auto-delete feature active after he received a legal hold. But it concluded plaintiffs had not sufficiently shown that responsive electronically stored information was lost from his personal account, so it denied sanctions against him. The court’s different outcomes turned on the evidence of loss and prejudice as to each individual; it did not sanction both defendants.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What happened to the shareholder lawsuit?
The spoliation ruling was made while the case was ongoing, because it affected discovery and pretrial proceedings. The Associated Press later reported that the investor suit settled during trial in 2025. Its report said settlement details had not been shared at the time of the announcement, so the available information here does not establish the amount or terms.
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Sources
- Delaware Court of Chancery memorandum opinion, January 21, 2025
- Court record on Sandberg’s email preservation
- Court record on sanctions and remedies
- Court record on Jeffrey Zients
- TechCrunch report on Sandberg spokesperson’s response
- Associated Press report on the 2025 settlement
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