FORT WORTH, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--A jury in Fort Worth has found that Washington, D.C.-based Consilio, which bills itself as the world’s largest e-discovery firm, violated a Texas criminal statute when it accessed a woman’s computer without effective consent.
Title 7, Chapter 33 of the Texas Penal Code – Breach of Computer Security – makes it a Class B misdemeanor for someone to knowingly access a computer without the owner’s effective consent.
Jurors in Judge Melody Wilkinson’s court also found the company negligent in downloading and destroying 10 years’ worth of emails and awarded $50,000 in damages on behalf of Angelyn Olson of Maine.
“I want to thank this court and this jury, because today, they truly have provided justice for Mrs. Olson,” says attorney Rob Miller of Miller Copeland in Dallas, who along with Emily Copeland represents Mrs. Olson. “If Consilio can do this to her, it can do it to any one of us, exposing everything we’ve ever looked at on the internet, every photograph we’ve taken or received. It’s scary. And I’m glad this jury said what Consilio did is wrong.”
Jimmy Goff of Goff Law in Dallas also represents the Olsons.
Consilio, which describes itself as “the global leader in eDiscovery, document review” and other legal services, was hired in a Maine case in which Mrs. Olson was a party. As a part of the litigation, her lawyers agreed to provide access to her email, allowing Consilio to search based on a small number of terms.
Rather than doing that, the company downloaded all of Mrs. Olson’s emails for a 10-year period, including those containing medical, counseling and financial information, Social Security numbers and attorney-client privileged materials.
Evidence in the case showed that when notified of the violation of the search agreement, and despite written notice to secure all the emails, the company destroyed them, leaving Mrs. Olson’s counsel no means of determining what Consilio did with the emails or with whom the company shared them.
In defending itself, the company said what happened reflected its “best practices” and that it was impossible to do the search as it had agreed, based on key terms. But another e-discovery company, Epiq, later managed to do the search while following the protocol.
The case is Angelyn A. Olson et al. v. Consilio, LLC and Willie Lathan, Cause No. 017-331812-22 in the 17th Judicial District Court in Tarrant County.
Dallas-based Miller Copeland LLP represents companies and individual clients from the U.S., Canada and the Far East. The firm focuses on Texas business law and civil dispute resolution. More information at millercopeland.com.