Bradford, J.
Case Summary
As Jessica Smiley was driving down Westfield Boulevard in Carmel, she struck and injured Charles Jennings, who was walking across the street. When the case proceeded to discovery, Jennings moved to compel a cellular telephone inspection to determine whether Smiley’s telephone had been running the Waze application at the time of the incident. Originally, the trial court granted Jennings’s motion but reversed itself following Smiley’s petition to reconsider. The case proceeded to jury trial, at the conclusion of which the jury found Jennings to be ninety percent at fault and Smiley ten percent. Jennings argues that the trial court abused its discretion when it disallowed targeted discovery of Smiley’s telephone, which he claimed was relevant to his claim that Smiley had been distracted while driving at the time of the incident. We affirm.
….
Jennings argues that the trial court’s refusal to allow the telephone inspection constitutes reversible error. [Footnote omitted.] We disagree. As Smiley notes, Trial Rule 26(B)(1) allows trial courts to limit the scope and methods of discovery…
Based on the record before us, we conclude that the burden of Jennings’s proposed telephone inspection outweighs its likely benefit in light of Smiley’s significant privacy concerns. We have previously noted that “[s]earching the data of a modern cell phone is intrusive”; therefore, to justify such an intrusive search, Jennings would have to provide strong indicators that Smiley had been using her cellular telephone at the time of the incident. Brown v. Eaton, 164 N.E.3d 153, 166 (Ind. Ct. App. 2021), trans. denied. Here, the record merely shows that Smiley claimed she had used Waze earlier in the day, Jennings’s expert testified that Smiley had been distracted, and percipient witnesses and investigating officers testified that Smiley had not appeared to be distracted. After weighing Smiley’s “legitimate privacy concerns and the Court’s error in reviewing the evidence from the [motion to compel] hearing,” the trial court was ultimately persuaded that the burden of the request outweighed the potential probative value of the telephone inspection. Appellant’s App. Vol. II p. 61. Without sufficient indicators that Smiley was using her cellular telephone at the time of the accident, we cannot say that the trial court abused its discretion in denying Jennings’s discovery request. See Ind. Trial Rule 26(B)(1).
Jennings alleges that this issue is one of first impression in Indiana, and consequently directs our attention to Antico v. Sindt Trucking, Inc., 148 So.3d 163 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2014) to help create a framework to balance discovery needs and privacy rights as it relates to cellular telephones. That case, however, does not help him…In other words, the evidence in Antico, unlike the evidence in this case, strongly indicated that the decedent had been using her cellular telephone at the time of the accident, therefore justifying a cellular-telephone inspection.
Moreover, we are confident that the Indiana trial rules sufficiently address this issue. Similar to the Florida rule cited by Jennings, Trial Rule 26(B) entrusts the trial court with the discretion to limit discovery in accordance with these rules “by order of the court[.]” Ind. Trial Rule 26(B). We conclude that turning to persuasive authority to craft a framework for such discovery requests is unnecessary. In short, we cannot say that the trial court abused its discretion in denying Jennings’s motion to compel. See Minges, 192 N.E.3d at 896.
The judgment of the trial court is affirmed.
Vaidik, J., and Brown, J., concur.