Ohio Court of Appeals: Employer Not Entitled to Self-Help By Keeping Employee’s Pay Check When He Removed Information from the Company’s Laptop.

Last month, the Ohio Court of Appeals for Richland County affirmed a trial court judgment which held that an resigning employee was entitled to his salary and final paycheck which his former employer withheld when it discovered that he had deleted information from the employer’s laptop. Bush v. Signals Power and Grounding Specialists, Inc., 2009-Ohio-5095 (9/25/09). However, the court remanded the case in order for the trial court to determine whether the employee should be liable for converting the employer’s property by wiping clean the laptop’s hard drive.

According to the court’s opinion, the plaintiff was employed to train his co-workers and to design and make presentations about the defendant’s business. In doing so, he developed a library of research which he stored on the laptop issued to him by the employer. When he decided to resign, he removed and/or wiped clean the hard drive of the laptop, erased the internet history and changed his password before returning it. Upon discovering that the information was missing, the employer emailed the plaintiff complaining about these actions and stating that he would not receive his final paycheck until this was all straightened out.

The employee then sued for his unpaid wages, unpaid vacation pay and unreimbursed employment expenses. The employer brought a counter-claim for conversion. The employee was ultimately awarded over $16,000 plus interest by the trial court, which dismissed the employer’s conversion counterclaim. The employer appealed.

Conversion consists essentially of retaining another’s property after its return has been requested. The trial court concluded that the employer could not prevail in this case because it had never demanded the return of its property. The employer argued both that it was not required to demand the return of its property under the circumstances and that, in any event, it had done so. The court of appeals agreed that the employer’s demand was a necessary element of the conversion claim, but that its email complaining about the deletion of the information and threatening to withhold the final paycheck until the matter was resolved could arguably constitute a demand for the return of its property under the circumstances. Therefore, the employer’s counterclaim was remanded back to the trial court to resolve on the merits.

The court of appeals also affirmed the verdict in favor of the employee’s wage claim. The employer argued that it was entitled to retain the employee’s wages because he had been a “faithless servant” by deleting/keeping the information library, etc. However, the court distinguished this situation from where an employee embezzles from his employer over time and the employer recoups his unpaid wages earned during the period of criminal faithlessness in order to minimize the amount of the theft. In this situation, the employee abruptly deleted the information in the minutes before he resigned and it was not accomplished over a lengthy period of time. Thus, retaining the wages he earned over the prior month was disproportionate to an action which took only a few minutes.

Insomniacs can read the full decision at http://www.sconet.state.oh.us/rod/docs/pdf/5/2009/2009-ohio-5095.pdf.

NOTICE: This summary is designed merely to inform and alert you of recent legal developments. It does not constitute legal advice and does not apply to any particular situation because different facts could lead to different results. Information here can change or be amended without notice. Readers should not act upon this information without legal advice. If you have any questions about anything you have read, you should consult with or retain an employment attorney.