You Can’t Take It with You: Pursuing Data Exfiltration Claims Against Former Employees
Author: Digital Mountain
With the Great Resignation bringing greater employee turnover, employers should wisely consider the legal implications of what needs to be done before and after employees walk out with proprietary information.
Not only does the opinion fault the employer for not following its own policies with respect to protecting data, but the court also goes on to say, in essence, the data couldn’t have been that important if they didn’t protect it after employment termination, as they’d already secured a right to do in their employment agreements.
If what you want is third-party verification from a trusted digital forensics provider that employer-owned data has been removed from a former employee’s devices, the words chosen can make all the difference.
The article gives some excellent caselaw consequences that should nudge corporate legal to reassess their employee departure policies and remedies available when data walks out the door. As I mentioned in my recent blog covering M365 Records Management, #Microsoft is adding a ‘Leavers’ classifier to public preview for premium E5 license customers.