Well, he's clever, I will give him that...
Mark Penn
When all is said and done, the abiding lesson of an ugly breakup involving the political powerhouse firm Penn, Schoen and Berland may be this: Be careful what you say using company e-mail.
In early June, the firm of Hillary Clinton’s pollster Mark Penn brought a federal suit against four former employees of his high-powered firm, on the grounds that they were violating their contracts by trying to make off with some his most lucrative corporate clients. In the course of doing so, Penn's representatives submitted more than 100 pages of contracts, excerpts from his company’s employee handbook and—most extraordinarily—electronic communications showing, according to his complaint, that the former employees were “engaging in an orchestrated and illegal plot to sabotage” the business he had founded.
On June 20, a U.S. District Court judge agreed, issuing a restraining order against the former employees from engaging in any more competitive activity. But it is the e-mails—which were subsequently removed from the public record when Mr. Penn voluntarily withdrew his complaint from federal court in Manhattan and refiled it on June 21, practically verbatim, in state Supreme Court in Manhattan—that have become the focus of the fight.
On June 29, a former PSB employee, Mitchell Markel, filed a countersuit claiming that Mr. Penn and his colleagues at the firm had “created a fake e-mail address in Markel’s name and manipulated his BlackBerry Cingular Account so that every time Markel pressed ‘send’ on his personal BlackBerry, every outgoing e-mail from his Yahoo and Global Insights accounts was simultaneously intercepted and sent to the phony address, an address known only to them, and to which only they controlled access.”...
http://www.observer.com/2007/former-employees-plotted-mark-penn-watched