In case filed by rival, McKinsey faces scrutiny over employees' actions

McKinsey & Company, the global consulting giant, has found itself ensnared in another public relations fire.

Just months after the firm's former managing director, Rajat K Gupta, was sent to prison on insider trading charges, McKinsey is facing a new challenge in court.

AlixPartners, a prominent firm that helps companies restructure their debts and operations, filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit this year against two of its former employees who jumped ship to McKinsey. But in its latest court filing, the firm contends that one of the employees copied confidential files and later destroyed a crucial AlixPartners document just as the court signalled it planned to ask for a forensic analysis of the defendants' electronic devices.

In a motion filed on Monday, AlixPartners asked the Delaware Chancery Court to impose sanctions on Eric Thompson, who joined a unit of McKinsey as a consultant in Asia this year, saying he deleted a folder containing a proprietary presentation on his Toshiba external hard drive and deleted 16,000 files on his Dell laptop.

McKinsey was not named as a defendant in the case.

Steven M Kayman, an outside lawyer for McKinsey who is representing the two consultants, declined to comment on the latest accusations. However, at a hearing in late April, he said that no AlixPartners documents were used by McKinsey and there was no misuse of the material taken by the two consultants. "Eric did absolutely nothing wrong," Kayman said in court. "The allegations against him are completely, absolutely unfounded."

Addressing the allegations against Ivo Naumann, the other defendant, Kayman emphasised that even if documents were taken by the two consultants, there was nothing nefarious involved.

But in court papers filed on Monday, AlixPartners painted a detailed picture of the document destruction, which it says took place after Vice-Chancellor Donald F Parsons Jr of the Delaware Chancery Court highlighted the importance of the material on the two men's electronic devices.

"These gentlemen, from what they have taken, have exposed themselves and, McKinsey too, to pretty broad-based electronic discovery of everything about them in the time period that matters, certainly for these two individuals and all these files they backed up and those kinds of things," Judge Parsons said in April.

Three weeks later, the judge ordered Thompson and Ivo Naumann to turn over their web-based email accounts and electronic devices to a third party for forensic analysis.

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