Manager played detective; company hit with huge suit
Filed under: Employee computer use, In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views, Security and law
If managers suspect an employee of wrong-doing, their first instinct may be to take matters into their own hands and investigate by themselves. But here are 17.5 million reasons they need to get HR involved:
In one recent case, a sales manager sued his former employer for accessing files on his personal computer.
The sales manager used his own laptop at work. His boss suspected he was stealing company secrets with the intention to start his own competing company.
So the supervisor removed the computer’s hard drive to see what was being stored. It turned out the employee had been inappropriately tracking the company’s sales data and product information. He was fired.
But the employee sued, alleging an invasion of privacy. He claimed the boss had no right to break into his computer in the first place. It was his personal laptop, and it also contained his own personal financial data.
The case went before a jury, and the employee was awarded $17.5 million from the company.
The company has also filed a countersuit against the employee for taking the data (as it turned out, he did start a competing business). But that case has yet to be decided.
Cite: Trealoff, et al. v. Forest River, Inc., et al.
Comments
One Comment on Manager played detective; company hit with huge suit
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JParr on
Tue, 21st Apr 2009 4:25 pm
This is a great argument for strong IT controls.
With the right expertise, even small shops can cost-effectively implement technology controls that prevent personal equipment from being used on the network.
As with any technology control, it must be enforcing a business policy in order to be effective.
If there had been a company policy against using personal equipment, supported by a technology control preventing the personal equipment from connecting to the network, then the employee would have been using company-supplied equipment, and the supervisor would have been fully justified in examining the data.
In the event that the employee did manage to bring his personal laptop to work and connect to the network, having the business policy in place means that he could be terminated with cause, potentially mitigating any further data loss.
At $199 per license or less, purchasing commercially-available encryption software means that even if the employee used the company-owned laptop to try to copy intellectual property, they would have been prevented from copying the data to removable media.
