My last post discussed how innovations in technology are creating more ways for employees to steal trade secrets from their employers.  A high profile case filed this month involving competing ride services Lyft, Inc. and Uber is a poster-child.

Lyft and Uber compete with traditional taxi services through used of internet based applications.  On November 5, 2014, Lyft filed a lawsuit in California against its former Chief Operating Officer, Travis Vanderzanden.  Vanderzanden is now a Vice President of Uber.

In the lawsuit, Lyft alleges that it performed a forensic analysis of the computer that Vanderzanden used while he worked for Lyft and discovered a massive theft of Lyft’s proprietary documents.  Lyft claims that the forensic analysis revealed the following actions by Vanderzanden before he resigned from Lyft: (1) Vanderzanden performed internet searches to learn how to back-up the Google based email he used during his employment at Lyft, (2) Vanderzanden backed up his Lyft e-mails to his iPhone, then later sold his Iphone – allegedly to dispose of the evidence and (3) Vanderzanden linked his personal Dropbox account to his Lyft computer, then uploaded more than 98,000 Lyft files and folders to that account – thereby allowing him to access the files from any computer in the world.  Lyft’s Complaint contains a long list of examples of proprietary documents allegedly in its former COO’s possession – including, a presentation to Lyft’s board of directors and Lyft’s 2014 “Product Roadmap.”

You can see Lyft’s complaint here.

In the interest of telling both sides of the story, Business Insider reports that Vanderzanden has publicly denied the allegations on Twitter.  You can see his Tweets in Business Insider’s article here.

For us, the point is not whether Lyft or Vanderzanden is telling the true story.  The point is that the threat is real.