The employee working for someone else

Situation. A company that suspected one of its own people was working against it: taking confidential material, steering clients toward a competitor, and coaching clients into improper alterations of contract terms.

The attack. From inside, with access, credibility and the company's own name behind him. To the clients, he was the company. Which made it dangerous in two directions: the company was losing business, and it was accumulating legal exposure for conduct committed in its name.

What most companies do. Confront him. He denies it, resigns cleanly, takes the client relationships with him, and the company is left with suspicion, no evidence and no enforceable restrictions — and it never learns which contracts were affected, which is the exposure that surfaces two years later.

What we did.

• Established the pattern before designing anything. A targeted response to specific evidence, not a search for something to find — which matters legally as much as practically.
• Ran an integrity test. An ordinary prospective client, an ordinary enquiry, no unusual inducement. The opportunity presented was the same one any real client would have presented. What he did with it was his own.
• Documented it lawfully, to the standard required where it took place.
• Mapped the exposure — which clients had been approached, and which contracts were affected.
• Closed it under counsel.

Outcome. Conduct evidenced rather than suspected. The affected contracts were cancelled before they became a client dispute. The competitor was sued, and settled.

The lesson. A denial is not evidence, and a confrontation is a decision to accept one. And the competitor receiving your clients is a defendant too — almost nobody pursues them.

Integrity testing is not entrapment. Present an ordinary opportunity; never manufacture an extraordinary one. An operation that induces conduct the subject would not otherwise have engaged in produces evidence that fails, and hands him a defence he did not previously have.