A former employee of one of ‘s top law firms has been referred to police after a scathing all-staff email blasted its top executives as ‘useless’ and ‘lazy’.
Slater + Gordon said it had ‘reasonable grounds’ to suspect the former employee ‘who was aware of the firm’s security protocols and had previously been authorised to access certain data’ in a statement on Tuesday.
The email, which was sent to the firm’s 900 staff, critiqued the personality flaws of the company’s leaders, detailing who was ‘disloyal’, ‘useless’, ‘a gossip’ and ‘lazy’.
Attached to the email was a spreadsheet containing the salaries, bonuses and performance ratings of every employee current to November last year.
In the firm’s first major update since the 21 February emails, chief executive Dina Tutungi said the outcome of the firm’s forensic investigation had been referred to Victoria Police.
The investigation confirmed the incident was a ‘premeditated and carefully planned attack’.
The author is believed to have had access to sensitive information including private dinners at Ms Tutungi’s home, rivalries between staff members, illnesses suffered by staff and discussions regarding which board member to ‘ditch this year’.
Ms Tutungi assured staff that no information about its clients was leaked in the ‘malicious’ email.
The forensic investigation found that at least ten identical emails had been sent in a 16-minute period from 9.41am on Friday, 21 February in an apparent effort to circumvent the firm’s IT protocols.
Slater + Gordon repeated its claim the firm’s former chief people officer Mari Ruiz-Matthysen, whose name was attached to the emails, was not responsible for the incident.
An ex-employee whose name was in the metadata of the payroll spreadsheet sent in the email said it was ‘distressing’ that people believed she was the author.
‘Maybe someone has created a profile on their own laptop and used my name to create that report, or if someone had manipulated the metadata, or someone is using my old profile … to do it,’ she told The n.
The woman pointed out that she was one of the employees included in the revelations on the email.
‘There’s no way I would have put my name in there, I’m very proficient in excel, I wouldn’t have done that,’ she said.
In the statement released on Tuesday, the firm said it acted ‘swiftly’ to contain the fallout from the leak by, among other things, removing the email from staff inboxes within 90 minutes.
Nonetheless, the email is believed to have been shared about 300 times internally and externally in the period before access was restricted.
The Melbourne-based firm said the IT team and certain senior executives were excluded from the recipients list in an apparent effort to support its spread.
The firm said the email contained a ‘range of false and misleading claims’.
‘This matter continues to be taken extremely seriously by Slater and Gordon, and we have referred the outcomes of the forensic investigation to Victoria Police. We will continue to assist the police with their work, Ms Tutungi said.
‘While this malicious incident was unwelcome, our priority remains our people and the critical work we do every day to provide access to justice for our clients.’
Victoria Police has been contacted for comment.
More to come.