Court threat

[mollybob]

My previous employer has accused me of breach of contract due to names on a memory stick (last December) a horrible year has passed and the threatening letters continue. I have agreed to having the memory stick checked professionally but they are threatening court action unless I pay their legal fees which is in excess of 20k I have a young family can my house be repossessed?

[ostell]

Do a full format of the memory stick before you submit it, not just a quick format. To be doubly sure fill it up, and I mean fill, with data that is purely connected with you, such as your own pictures, and then do the full format.

The reason being is that deleting files does not actually delete them, it just makes the space available for use to store other files and the data remains "as is".. Recovering the "deleted" files is a fairly simple process, as my sister in laws now ex husband found out when I brought back to life a lot of letters that he had written to his mistress and he had "deleted" on the old computer he gave to their son. There is free software available on the internet that will do the full disk write and delete for you, using garbage data.

What are they going to claim for in court? Only a court can decide if the other parties legal fees have to be paid.

Perhaps this article will be of help I haven't tried this myself so I can't vouch for the method.

[mollybob]

Thank you for you help.

[R0b]

When you say your employer had accused you of collecting information belonging to your former employer, have you admitted it or denied it? What is the relevance of agreeing to have it checked professionally, is that to confirm no data was on the memory stick or that the data has been deleted? Also, have you handed the memory stick over to them yet?

Whether they can recover fees depends on what position you took. If you are absolutely confident that you never took information from your ex-employer then you have nothing to worry about. If you initially denied it but subsequently accepted that data had been taken then it might be a question of whether the costs are proportionate will need to be decided by a judge and whether the pre-action protocols were engaged i.e. a letter before action. If the answer is no the protocols were not engaged then you should be liable for costs but if they were, then it is possible you could be liable if they pursued it. There has been a recent case on issuing a claim for pre-action costs but as far as I can gather it only seems to be where the claim itself still exists (if it's extinguished i.e. settled then costs might not be recoverable).

The attached article explains all of the above in relation to a recent High Court case.

[mollybob]

I was actually still being paid as an employee, under contract, working out my 3 months notice period when I was accused of potentially taking information with me. The beef with my ex employer is that I might have used the contacts. Whilst I was receiving solicitors letters I still had to go in to work everyday and everyone was barred from talking to me- it really was awful. I never had any intention on using the information on the memory stick- it was purely for ease of work as my laptop was so slow. This has cost me dearly as they approached my prospective new employers who promptly rescinded their offer so this has left me without employment. I am really worried that if this goes to court my home will be repossessed- they have an aggressive solicitor and after spending £6k I don’t as I can’t afford one and the CAB say they can’t help. The solicitor sends the emails at 16:55 on a Friday- I am sure there will be another one this week...