The Mintz Group offers a broad range of services to counsel for employers in disputes involving prospective, current, departing and departed employees.

Following are some of the recurring issues involving employees on which we have worked successfully.

Deleted Emails, Etc.
One way we help employers investigate workplace misconduct is by finding the electronic trails that employees leave behind. Our ability to resurrect material that employees have deleted from company computers, particularly emails, has cracked many cases for our employer clients.

The Mintz Group's computer forensics team is headed by Kevin Treuberg. Kevin has more than a decade of experience in both the public and private sectors and he holds the EnCase Certified Examiner (EnCE) certification.

Signs of Disloyalty Before Departure
We have helped a number of companies and their counsel pursue suspicions that recently departed employees have left with trade secrets or “jumped the gun” in creating a competing business. We usually begin by helping clients search their own information systems to recreate the employee's final weeks or months of employment, including emails, phone calls and even building-entry logs.

Then we scour the public record, looking, for example, for a new company the employee may have created while he still owed his loyalty to our client.

And finally, we often seek to interview people the departed employee may disloyally have tried to recruit—customers, suppliers or fellow employees.

In one case, we helped enforce a non-compete agreement on our real-estate client's former partner, who had agreed not to participate in projects within a certain geographical area. We identified and interviewed architects, contractors and other eyewitnesses who gave devastating testimony about a new project of the former partner's that clearly violated his non-compete agreement.

Theft of Trade Secrets
We routinely investigate allegations that sensitive corporate information has been stolen by employees or others. A computer-company client of ours, for example, learned that a departing scientist had emailed some of its trade secrets out to a professor in Japan before quitting to join a competitor. As he left, the scientist claimed that the email was a mistake, and that his professor friend had nothing to do with his new employer, which was a company in Oregon. We searched in the United States and found that the Japanese professor was actually the president of the Oregon company. Then we pulled public records in Japan and found the Oregon company was a subsidiary of a Japanese multinational - deep pockets for the theft-of-intellectual-property lawsuit our client brought.

Discrimination and Harassment
The Mintz Group has wide-ranging experience helping employers get the facts in response to claims of racial and sexual discrimination and harassment. It helps that our investigative staff is racially diverse, and that more than half our investigators are women.

Jim Mintz wrote a Wall Street Journal “Manager's Journal” column called “Harassment 101: How to Handle Complaints” a few years ago that offered detailed lessons from our investigations for employers. (Copies available on request.)

Other Employee Misconduct
The Financial Times published the following about one of our cases on March 3, 2000:

An American computer company hired Jim Mintz, president of the James Mintz Group, to investigate an executive in its European branch office. The company, which hired Mr Mintz on a Monday, was due to negotiate a friendly severance with the executive at the end of the week, worth about $500,000.

The company had picked up rumours that the executive had been running a side company that had been stealing business opportunities from his employer for years. It had got as far as learning the name of the executive's firm—Secretco for the purposes of this article. “They flew me to Europe to confirm or deny that rumour before the negotiations began in a few days,” Mr Mintz recalls.

While Mr Mintz was still above the Atlantic, his colleagues began searching corporate databases for European firms called Secretco. They unearthed a dozen such companies, and began to identify the executives behind each one.

Within a day, Teledata, a Swiss database to which Mr Mintz subscribes, supplied an answer. The executive had established Secretco AG in Switzerland some years before, while supposedly working full-time for Mr Mintz's client.

“I spent the next two days, right up to the Friday deadline, interviewing the computer company's distributors, and discovered that several had been quietly approached by the executive to do business on the side with Secretco,” Mr Mintz says. Just before the Friday negotiation, one of the distributors handed the investigator a brochure produced by Secretco, providing hard evidence of the executive's unauthorised activities.

When the planned meeting began, Mr Mintz sat in the room as his client put its accusations to the executive. He denied ever having heard of such a company, and demanded his $500,000 payout. “I went into my briefcase and laid Secretco's colour brochure on the table,” says Mr Mintz. “By the end of the day he had settled for hundreds of thousands of dollars less than the severance otherwise due to him.”