No. 23-2853 ___________________________

Daniel’la Deering

Plaintiff - Appellant

v.

Lockheed Martin, a Maryland Corporation

Defendant - Appellee

Maryanne Lavan, an individual; Kenneth Bastian, an individual

Defendants ____________

Appeal from United States District Court for the District of Minnesota ____________

Submitted: May 7, 2024 Filed: September 17, 2024 ____________ Before COLLOTON, Chief Judge, SHEPHERD and STRAS, Circuit Judges. ____________ STRAS, Circuit Judge.

The district court decided that the appropriate sanction for a plaintiff who lied in a deposition and withheld information was dismissal. We affirm. I.

After Lockheed Martin fired Daniel’la Deering, one of its in-house lawyers, she sued for discrimination and retaliation. Summary judgment marked the end of the road for her discrimination claim, but her retaliation claim would have gone to a jury if she had not spent more than a year and a half misleading Lockheed and the district court 1 about her employment.

The deception began at her deposition, when she claimed to be “currently employed” by a company called nVent. As Lockheed would later learn, she had already accepted a job elsewhere that paid significantly more money. Yet when Lockheed’s counsel specifically asked about her job hunt, she replied that it was “exhausting and disheartening to keep applying for jobs and not get[] anything,” so she had not “looked for any alternative employment while . . . working for nVent.” Despite signing an errata sheet afterward, she made no attempt to correct the inaccuracy.

Instead, she doubled down on the deception. Several months after the deposition, long after she had started working at the other company, she submitted a declaration, along with a copy of her résumé, to the district court. The first item listed was “Associate General Counsel, Director” at nVent, a role she had purportedly held from February 2021 to the “present.” (Emphasis added). Then, in two confidential settlement letters, she “reference[d] nVent as [her] current employer and use[d] her salary and benefits [there] as a basis for her damages calculation.” (Emphasis added). No mention of any other employer.

Lockheed only discovered the deception in the weeks leading up to trial. A disclosure listed her “[a]ctual [i]ncome” for the previous year as $260,866, but tucked within her trial exhibits were two documents telling a different story. One

1 The Honorable David S. Doty, United States District Judge for the District of Minnesota. -2- was a W-2 showing that she had made nearly twice as much, $452,214, working elsewhere. The other was a signed employment agreement with her new employer.

With Deering’s W-2 and signed employment agreement in hand, Lockheed filed an emergency motion for sanctions. Following a hearing, the district court opted to dismiss Deering’s case with prejudice. Characterizing her deceit as “intentional, willful, and in bad faith,” the court thought that any other sanction “would provide no more than a slap on the wrist.” It then went on to award Lockheed $93,193 in attorney fees.

II.

Courts have long recognized that dismissal is available as a sanction for “willfulness [or] bad[-]faith” conduct in litigation. Societe Internationale Pour Participations Industrielles et Commerciales,