Harassment or discrimination cases can result from ill-fated relationships between an employee and non-employee (or two employees) who text, tweet, e-mail, or send compromising photos via your company’s networks or devices. Other types of small cases that can implicate your company or its computer and cellular resources are labor disputes, wrongful terminations, corporate espionage, or trademark or intellectual property disputes. All of these cases can land one or more of your company’s hard drives or flash drives in court. The hard or flash drive can come from work computers, personal laptops, or personal and business cellphones.
Theft of proprietary data and breaches of contract
You work for a small to medium enterprise (SME), and you’re concerned that an employee who’s leaving is sending privileged information via the company’s e-mail system to the new employer. Certainly leaving such obvious clues is outright dumb, yet it’s widespread — in part, because some people take the path of least effort. The departing employee may mistakenly believe that by deleting the sent messages, the evidence is gone. Theft of intellectual property or breach of contracts leave obvious trails and details that you can use to recover losses due to the theft.
Some terminated employees may steal customer or product data to improve their job opportunities with a new employer. In addition to traditional state remedies, such as misappropriation of trade secrets, you can take advantage of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act’s (CFAA) civil remedies to sue former employees and their new companies to get compensated for your losses.
Marital matters
E-mail, GPS, and cellphone logs; Web photo albums (such as Google’s Picasa Web Albums, at http://picasa.google.com); and postings on social networks give divorce lawyers many avenues of proof of misconduct.
If you have evidence that at any relevant e-evidence is stored on your spouse’s hard drive, you can file an e-discovery request seeking complete access to the hard drive. You may even be granted access to password-protected files if there’s a reasonable possibility that such files contain relevant evidence.
Your company can become a third party to divorce cases. For example, in a divorce case brought against an executive vice president (EVP) on the grounds of adultery, the plaintiff may seek to discover the defendant’s texts, e-mails, and incoming and outgoing phone records from the company-issued BlackBerry. The plaintiff may subpoena the EVP’s employer for access to the defendant’s desktop and laptop computers. The EVP’s messages may contain references to corporate trade secrets and to attorney-client-privileged matters with corporate counsel that are unrelated to the divorce action. You may need to hire forensic computer experts and lawyers to preserve and remove all privileged ESI. If you’re in this situation, see topic 13, where we talk about computer forensics specialists.
When parties are emotionally embroiled, that volcanic situation has the power to interfere with the e-discovery process and even make cost concerns secondary or irrelevant to a personal agenda. Nowhere is that more true than in bitter divorce cases. As you can find out in the later section, “Characterizing Small Matters,” your company computers and handhelds may become discoverable in marital cases.
Defamation and Internet defamation
Defamation can lead to a lawsuit. Defamation is a false statement that damages a person’s reputation and exposes that person to public contempt, hatred, ridicule, or condemnation. If the false statement is published in print or through broadcast media, such as radio or TV, it’s libel. If the defamation is spoken, it’s slander.
You must usually prove these three things for defamation:
The statement was published. Someone had to see or hear the statement.
‘ The statement is false. The statement that’s made about the person has to be more than only an opinion.
A person or company’s reputation was damaged in some way.
Defamatory statements made in blogs or text messages (including those on Twitter) are leading to lawsuits. The first libel suit against a Twitter user was filed in a United States court in March 2009. Singer Courtney Love was sued for libel for her allegedly defaming remarks about fashion designer Dawn Simorangkir on Twitter and MySpace. This lawsuit is one of a growing class of suits against bloggers, posters, tweeters, and social media users. You can’t hide if you’ve posted something that is defamatory.
In 2009, the Media Law Resource Center (www.medialaw.org) tracked 258 Web-related U.S. lawsuits. That number was a steep increase from 110 cases in 2008. The lawsuits included defamation, copyright infringement, and fake profiles on social network sites such as MySpace and Facetopic. Blog postings made up the majority of Internet-related lawsuits.
