It's a terrible result for everyone, plaintiff, defendant and court.
Plaintiff because, culpable or not, those texts may be the best explanation for whatever happened. Losing them means they're framing their arguments a bit in the dark. It's easier to persuade if you land pretty close to an actual truth, and that's harder without complete discovery of executive communications.
For defendants, because the explanations are actually pretty plausible for a municipal IT operation, and it's dumb for big liability to ride on some stupid, irrelevant IT gaffe on some peripheral technology.
The court because there isn't a good answer and deciding big cases on questionable legal presumptions and fictions that themselves turn on irrelevant technical arcana-- these are the things people dislike about lawyers.
"the explanations are actually pretty plausible for a municipal IT operation"
Nah.
> The former mayor has offered a number of explanations for the missing messages, including that she dropped her phone in water, that she inadvertently changed the phone’s deletion settings and that “someone” set a new phone to delete messages older than 30 days, resulting in a rolling deletion of previous messages.
Individually, sure. Combined? That's an unlikely set of circumstances. This, too:
> The order notes that Best’s phone at some point was also set to delete text messages after a month, despite her obligation to keep them due to pending litigation. Zilly noted that the former chief apparently deleted more than 27,000 of those text messages by hand.
All this while subject to a litigation hold looks very bad. Letting them wiggle out of it would encourage such behavior in the future.
To the obvious one.
"Assume there was evidence so bad they risked criminal charges to get rid of it" makes instilling doubt a lot harder.