Law – Suspicious About Working With Competition

A partner at a boutique law firm in the Midwest was concerned that one of the lawyers on his team was talking to a competitive firm. He was a hybrid worker and recently had
long stretches during the day away from his computer. There had been some talk that the competitor had been looking to poach lawyers from their firm because of their specialized expertise.

The partner needed to get proof that the lawyer was using company time and his company computer in order to confidently confront him on the issue. He also wanted a solution to get ahead of any other potential problems with other members of the team:

• Check email content and destination
• View screenshots to see if resumes or other personal information was being sent
• View meetings and Zoom call information
• See if sensitive company information was being accessed or sent

The partner and his head of information security worked with Veriato to set up employee monitoring for the entire team. With Veriato, the partner has the ability to monitor his staff to ensure that they aren’t using company time or company assets to communicate with competitor firms. Veriato has enabled the partner to:

• Look at screen recordings of Zoom calls and messages to see if a lawyer communicates with a competing firm.
• Create customized alerts that automatically flag the presence of keywords such as the competitor firm name.
• Set up notifications if any sensitive information is accessed.

The partner got definitive proof that the lawyer in question was communicating with the competitor firm. After managing the issue, the partner established regular monitoring for the team and the team was no longer able to communicate with any competitor firms on company time or with company computers. The monitoring has been so successful that the HR team has established a process that’s used by several partner teams across the firm.