Legal Question in Business Law in Washington

Re: Deleted files of a computer

The accounting files are your company's property and you have right to have them back. I'm assuming you do not have duplicates. If you do, see my comments about UTSA below, and proceed from there.

The answer to the question of how to proceed depends on many things.

First, when the files were deleted from "her computer", do you mean that the computer was the company computer assigned to her, or do you mean that she was using her own computer to do company work? [Not a good idea, by the way.]

If the files were on a company computer, your practical options are to reconstruct the files or to have a computer forensics expert see if he can find the files on the hard disk. (Often when files are "deleted", they are still actually present and can be found until overwritten.) Which method you choose will depend on which is most expensive. Then you can bring an action against your employee for the cost of reconstruction.

If the computer is hers, you can again reconstruct the files, or possibly bring a court action to force her to allow a computer forensics expert to try to find your files on her hard disk.

I would encourage you to talk to an attorney as soon as you can about this. It would probably also be useful for the attorney to write her a letter indicating your intent to recover the cost of restoring your company property and reminding her under the Uniform Trade Secrets Act that your accounting files may be protected secrets, and if she uses the information in violation of UTSA, you may take further action against her.

The point of that last step is partly to give her fair warning, but mostly to flush out a copy of the deleted files, if one happens to exist. Otherwise, if she is judgment proof (means "has no money to speak of"), in practical terms, you will be stuck with whatever cost is associated with restoring your files.

Of course, there may be undisclosed details in your case which preclude the above options, so your best next step is to talk to an attorney about the details first.