A pharmaceutical company's most valuable intellectual property walked out the door with a departing executive. Law & Forensics traced every file, secured a preliminary injunction, and produced an evidence record that drove a nine-figure settlement.
The Situation
A top-20 global pharmaceutical company discovered that a senior research director had transferred tens of thousands of confidential files to personal devices and cloud-storage accounts in the 72 hours before her resignation. Within a month, she had accepted a role at a direct competitor actively developing compounds in the same therapeutic category.
At stake was more than four hundred million dollars in estimated trade-secret value — including novel synthesis protocols, Phase II trial datasets, and regulatory strategy documents for three lead compounds. The company needed to act quickly: every day the competitor retained access to those files compressed the client's regulatory exclusivity window and undermined years of R&D investment.
The case also carried significant eDiscovery complexity. The company's data environment spanned on-premises research servers, Microsoft 365 cloud tenancies, a third-party clinical data warehouse, and the personal devices used by the departing executive under a bring-your-own-device policy.
Our Approach
Law & Forensics engaged on dual tracks — forensic investigation and eDiscovery — from day one.
Forensic investigation. Examiners imaged corporate laptops, a personal MacBook, an external SSD, and three cloud-storage accounts under coordinated legal process. File-system metadata analysis, USB-connection artifacts, and cloud-sync logs were correlated to reconstruct the precise sequence and volume of exfiltration across six distinct data pathways. The team identified 47,000-plus files — many bearing the company's proprietary data-classification markings — that had been transferred, with timestamps placing the bulk of activity in a single 18-hour window before the executive's last day.
Chain of custody and expert testimony. Every evidentiary artifact was collected under forensically sound protocols, with hash-verified copies maintained for court production. A Law & Forensics expert prepared a detailed methodology report and was retained as a testifying expert, withstanding Daubert challenge at the preliminary injunction stage.
eDiscovery leadership. Law & Forensics issued legal-hold notices to more than 200 custodians, processed 3.4 TB of data through a defensible review workflow, and produced a prioritized document set to litigation counsel — achieving first production within 21 days of engagement. Predictive-coding technology, validated by statistical sampling, reduced attorney review hours by an estimated 60 percent.
The Impact
Forensic findings directly supported a motion for preliminary injunction, which the court granted within 60 days — halting the competitor's use of the misappropriated data while litigation proceeded. The comprehensiveness of the forensic record and the speed of the eDiscovery production gave the client significant negotiating leverage. The parties reached a nine-figure confidential settlement before trial, preserving the client's competitive position in the therapeutic category.
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Files forensically attributed to exfiltration | 47,000+ |
| Days to preliminary injunction | 60 |
| Distinct data-exfiltration pathways reconstructed | 6 |
| Settlement outcome | Nine figures, confidential |
