Charles Jennings v. Jessica A. Smiley

Summary

The Indiana Supreme Court affirmed the denial of a plaintiff’s motion to compel forensic access to the defendant’s smartphone in a pedestrian-vehicle negligence action. The Court held that a party seeking smartphone discovery must provide some evidence that the device was used when it could have contributed to the incident and must describe the requested data with reasonable particularity, while the trial court must weigh privacy as a discovery burden under proportionality principles. The plaintiff failed to satisfy those requirements because the evidence did not support phone use at the time of the accident and the request was overbroad and partly duplicative.