Lawyer Spies On Former Firm – Act 1: The Mysteriously Moving Mouse

Sit back and listen to a story about Justin Scott, a lawyer who admitted to spying on his former firm with TeamViewer. This is eCrimeBytes.com S 2 E 5-1 – Lawyer Spies On Former Firm – Act 1: The Mysteriously Moving Mouse.

Sources:

• https://www.abajournal.com/web/article/lawyer-is-censured-for-using-teamviewer-to-snoop-on-former-firms-business-activity
• https://drblookupportal.judiciary.state.nj.us/SearchResults.aspx?type=docket_no&docket_no=22-066
• https://drblookupportal.judiciary.state.nj.us/DocumentHandler.ashx?document_id=1161175
• https://drblookupportal.judiciary.state.nj.us/DocumentHandler.ashx?document_id=1167301
• https://www.databreaches.net/lawyer-censured-for-using-teamviewer-to-snoop-on-former-firms-business-activity/

Transcript:

00:00:10:00 – 00:00:31:20
Keith
Hey, welcome to eCrimeBytes Season two Episode five. This one is a lawyer. His name is Justin Scott, and he spies on his former law firm. And I picked this one especially for Seth, because we talked about professions in prior episodes. And, you know, we picked on police officers and we’ve picked on a lot of different professions.

00:00:31:20 – 00:00:57:16
Keith
But now we’re picking on the attorney profession and we’re going to see what happens for electronic crime in that industry. Now, we’re going to be talking to you about pretty standard stuff here where just imagine it’s just your standard office computers. But there’s one application that he used to spy on his former law firm, and it’s called Teamviewer.

00:00:57:17 – 00:01:22:06
Keith
And we’ll talk a little more about that in a minute. And another little bit of a difference if you follow our podcast, this isn’t going to be a criminal prosecution like we usually bring for you. You know, we don’t really have any rules in how we do this podcast. And so I picked a case this time that’s basically a disciplinary action for a lawyer which has court documents that I can pull just like a criminal case.

00:01:22:06 – 00:01:25:09
Keith
And that’s how I’m able to bring you the story today.

00:01:25:09 – 00:01:57:02
Keith
The criminal or I’m sorry, the defendant in this case. I’m so used to saying criminal and all our prior episodes. His name is Justin Scott. He was a partner with another individual named Charles Bratton at a law firm. And there was a split. And when this split happened, this crime, which was Justin Scott looking back at data at his former law firm, once he wasn’t an employee there, that’s when this all happened.

00:01:57:04 – 00:02:27:06
Keith
So what we’re going to do is we’re going to bring you this story over four acts this week. And the act number one, which is what we’re in today, it’s called the mysteriously moving mouse. And then on Tuesday, we’re going to bring you act two, which is the investigation on Wednesday. And Act three, Justin Scott, he comes clean and on Thursday in Act four, we’re going to tell you what the actual punishment is at the end of this.

00:02:27:06 – 00:02:35:23
Keith
All right. And with that, we’re going to just go ahead and jump into Act one. Did you have anything to say before I just go ahead and pull him up on the screen here, Seth.

00:02:35:26 – 00:02:48:27
Seth
As I say, it’s a good thing that you started off this podcast talking about making sure lawyers are included because, you know, there’s no such thing as lawyer jokes or, you know, lawyers getting involved in criminal shit. They never do that.

00:02:48:27 – 00:02:53:02
Keith
Yeah, no kidding. Well, you know, doctors we picked on doctors.

00:02:53:02 – 00:03:01:11
Seth
We had it dripping with sarcasm, especially going on with current, you know, election news and stuff like that. Okay. Let’s talk about Justin Scott.

00:03:01:11 – 00:03:27:03
Keith
So what I’m doing now is I’m putting a picture for our video listeners of Justin Scott on your screen. And this is his website. This is I just went straight to his website. I put his website link down there. You can go visit it and learn all about what it is that he does and I am now going to have Seth tell you about what it is that Justin Scott does and a little bit about his history.

00:03:27:06 – 00:03:50:02
Seth
So in a nutshell, he is a fairly young attorney. He was admitted to the New Jersey bar in 2014. He had no prior disciplinary history tends to be rare that you do find a lawyer with history of discipline actions he practiced in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Cherry Hill, New Jersey is a very fancy let’s call it a rich person’s town in northern New Jersey.

00:03:50:02 – 00:04:19:28
Seth
I’ve been there. It’s lovely. And he was employed at a law firm called Rothamel Bratton around December 2016. So that was renamed the Bratton Law Group and then it was renamed Bratton Scott. But I guess the notion of they had a good up and coming young attorney who was clearly made a partner, partners get the names in the firm that was located in Haddonfield, New Jersey, which is another small town in northern New Jersey.

00:04:20:01 – 00:04:39:16
Seth
They specialize in elder law, which is a very specific area of law to make sure that obviously people who are elderly maintain their federal and state rights. Now, this is important. Scott held a 7% ownership interest in the firm. Now. Jones, I got to tell you, that sounded weird to me, that they would change the name to Bratton Scott with 7%.

00:04:39:18 – 00:05:03:26
Seth
But we learned that he would gain more ownership based upon, I guess, Scott’s and the firm’s performance. And let’s be clear, performance means how much money are you bringing in pursuant to his direct action. Meaning can he bring in more clients? Has nothing to do with the quality of the practice of law. And apparently Bratton could terminate Scott any time before he held up to a 30% interest.

00:05:03:28 – 00:05:35:00
Seth
So we also understand from the court documents that Scott never got close to 30% interest in the 19 months he worked out. This is going to be really important because we learned that in July of 2018, Justin Scott and Charles Bratton had a disagreement and they split. Now it is unclear if Justin Scott was fired or if he quit, but we do know that on the day that he left that firm, the access to his computer for work computer was cut.

00:05:35:00 – 00:05:53:21
Seth
So it is unclear from the court documents if Mr. Scott was terminated or if he quit. The court documents have the deposition notes from when Mr. Bratton, the named partner of the firm, was interviewed, and they asked him, How was Mr. Scott let go from the firm.

00:05:53:21 – 00:06:12:12
Seth
He explained that they were in a different office in Morristown, which is another New Jersey city, and Mr. Bratton asked Mr. Scott to come into the office to explain the rationale for the termination, which we didn’t get. By the way, I assume it was a lack of bringing in clients. It’s usually why you terminate a client. I’m sorry, a partner.

00:06:12:15 – 00:06:36:13
Seth
Mr. Scott was visibly upset. He apparently was spoken to the next day and Bratton reiterated the fact that he was terminated and that was it. So the respondent, meaning Scott, maintained that he left the firm because he found Bratton difficult to work with. He did not like his management style and he decided to open his own law practice.

00:06:36:13 – 00:06:59:10
Seth
So it sounds to me, Jones, like this is a you can’t fire me because I quit situation. Now, in my experience, the only reason why people really would do that is if they’re sure they can still collect unemployment or if they already have another job lined up, or they’re so outraged by this scenario. But it matters because, well, you’ll find out why it matters.

00:06:59:12 – 00:07:32:05
Keith
Okay, so this is July 23rd of 2018. And now I want to fast forward you to September 20th of 2019. We had to give you that background of what happened with the law firm, because on this day, the Bratton Law Group has a new attorney. His name is Matthew Bravette. He was working on his computer and he noticed an incoming connection by a program called Teamviewer.

00:07:32:08 – 00:07:43:04
Keith
And if you’re a computer person, you probably can skip ahead a little bit a few minutes here, I’m going to stop and introduce our non computer people to what teamviewer is. You can imagine what happened in this case.

00:07:43:04 – 00:07:57:13
Keith
First thing I want to do is pop up TeamViewer’s website here for our video listeners while I talk. So Teamviewer is a program that you would install on a computer that you want to

00:07:57:13 – 00:07:59:05
Keith
remotely control.

00:07:59:07 – 00:08:23:11
Keith
So for instance, if I have a server and it’s in a data center in another continent, I could put Teamviewer on it, sit up my home a continent away, connect to that server and see the screen exactly as if I was sitting there. So if I were to move my mouse here in my continent, the mouse virtually would move on the server on the other continent.

00:08:23:13 – 00:08:33:14
Keith
Now, it’s not going to be that extreme here. We’re not talking about continents, but we’re still talking about the same program, same capabilities of having remote control capabilities.

00:08:33:14 – 00:08:35:19
Keith
Okay. So with that information,

00:08:35:19 – 00:08:57:02
Keith
you can imagine that a connection coming in that says Teamviewer is likely going to give somebody remotely access to your computer if you were to see that on your computer, like Matthew Bravette saw on his computer.

00:08:57:05 – 00:09:22:15
Keith
So back with Mr. Bravette. He was doing his work and it’s around 8 p.m. that night and he noticed the incoming connection and he said after that he noticed his screen started moving without his input. And that’s an exact quote from the paperwork. He said that when he took control of the mouse to move the cursor, the Teamviewer connection was terminated.

00:09:22:15 – 00:09:45:21
Keith
And so immediately you go, Oh, what could this be? And I’m going to say, you’re going to have to come back tomorrow for Act two, because this is the investigation. We just led you up to the crime and you’re probably going, what the hell just happened? You’re going to find out because the investigation is going to uncover what happened in all these times that Teamviewer was used.

00:09:45:21 – 00:09:57:09
Keith
So if you enjoyed anything in this act of this video or audio podcast that you’re listening to, please like us on whatever application it is that you watch or

00:09:57:09 – 00:10:17:02
Keith
listen to us to. And subscribe on whatever application you use as well. And specifically, if you’re an Apple podcast user, we could use some five star reviews there because when that happens, we pop up in the search criteria and we tend to get more listeners.

00:10:17:05 – 00:10:39:17
Keith
And I’ve steadily watched our Apple podcast group grow in our statistics, so if you could do that favor for us, we’d be much appreciative. And with that, please do come back tomorrow. We’re going to get into the investigation and what actually happened when Teamviewer took over Mr. Bravette’s computer at the Bratton Law Group. Thanks.

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