First Place, LLC, owner of First Place Tower in Tulsa, sued Otis Elevator Company in late 2024 alleging breach of contract, gross negligence, and actual fraud over Otis's maintenance of the building's elevators — alleged in the complaint to number 15 — under a ten-year service agreement running through August 2027. First Place terminated the contract on April 29, 2024, citing pervasive and continuing material breaches of the Otis Maintenance Agreement since at least October of 2023, which constituted a threat to public safety. Otis removed the case to the Northern District of Oklahoma and counterclaimed, alleging First Place breached the agreement by failing to give Otis a 90-day opportunity to cure.
The sanctions dispute centered on an inspection report that First Place attached to its petition as Exhibit D, labeled "Independent 3rd Party Report, Inspection Date 4.11.2024," with no author identified. First Place later attributed the report to state safety inspector Mark White in expert disclosures and in 30(b)(6) deposition testimony. When Otis deposed White on July 21, 2025, he testified he had never seen the report and had no idea who wrote it.
Three days later, First Place produced the unaltered original. It showed the document was actually an "American Elevator Technical Assesment" — the court's spelling follows the document — bearing the logo of American Elevator Company, a direct competitor of Otis, on nearly every one of its 55 pages. Someone at First Place had replaced the cover page with a newly drafted generic cover and stripped the American Elevator header from almost every remaining page. First Place also withdrew its expert disclosure for White and produced emails — previously requested but not produced — showing that four First Place employees had received the original, unaltered report from American Elevator in April 2024, the same month First Place terminated the Otis contract.
Judge Jodi F. Jayne, applying the five-factor framework from Ehrenhaus v. Reynolds, 965 F.2d 916 (10th Cir. 1992), found by clear and convincing evidence that First Place engaged in a pattern of bad-faith litigation conduct. On culpability, the court found the alteration was intentional and designed to conceal that First Place was soliciting a competitor's evaluation of Otis's work while still under contract — information that bore directly on Otis's counterclaim for wrongful termination. First Place's witnesses offered no sworn explanation of who made the alterations, when, or why, and the court found not credible the shifting theories offered by counsel, including that the cover page was simply lost or that the alterations were made to protect a former Otis mechanic. On prejudice, the court found that Otis's inability to trust First Place's evidence and its strategic disadvantage in formulating its counterclaim both weighed in favor of dismissal. The court also found the judicial process was substantially disrupted, requiring a scheduling extension and ultimately striking the trial date.
The court considered and rejected lesser sanctions. Excluding the report entirely would benefit First Place by shielding it from credibility attacks while still allowing it to pursue its claims. Admitting both versions and permitting cross-examination would still allow a jury to consider a competitor's detailed criticism of Otis's performance despite the bad-faith conduct. A monetary sanction, the court held, would lack adequate deterrent effect. Only one Ehrenhaus factor — absence of a prior warning that dismissal was a likely sanction — did not weigh in favor of dismissal, and the court noted that such a warning is not a prerequisite under Tenth Circuit precedent. First Place's claims were dismissed with prejudice under Rule 37(b)(2)(A) and the court's inherent equitable powers. The parties were ordered to confer and submit a status report on the remaining counterclaim by May 8, 2026.