On August 16, the Los Angeles Times reported that Jeffrey Gundlach is currently on trial for stealing data from TCW Group, an investment management company and his former employer, in order to start his own firm, DoubleLine Capital. Gundlach allegedly took more than half of TCW Group's employees with him after he was fired, along with devices and client information belonging to the company. Gundlach denies all charges.

In addition to their action against Gundlach, TCW Group has also included three other former employees in its $375 million suit, reported the New York Times on August 15. The company is charging the four individuals with conspiracy, corruption and theft, alleging that they conspired to utilize TCW Group's information to set up a rival group and stole trade secrets in order to do so. In retaliation, Gundlach has filed a countersuit for more than $500 million in damages. According to him, he was fired by TCW Group because the company no longer wanted to pay him the lucrative fees that he recieved setting up fixed-income funds.

Cris Santa Ana, one of the individuals who left TCW Group with Gundlach and is indited in the ongoing suit, recently testified against him. According to an August 16 Bloomberg BusinessWeek article, Santa Ana, who worked as the managing director of the mortgage-backed securities team managed by Gundlach at TCW Group, told the court that he had been ordered by Gundlach in September 2009 to back up any data that "might be useful to have" in the case that the two were fired. According to him, he, as well as other individuals who left TCW Group, downloaded contact information, contracts, trade orders and portfolio holdings belonging to the company's clients. In addition, the group copied the corporation's entire mortgage-backed securities data base and transferred it onto an external hard drive.

The New York Times also reported that TCW Group's former vice president testified in court that she smuggled a hard drive out of the company's headquarters on the evening of December 4, 2009 on Gundlach's orders. However, while TCW Group alleges that Gundlach could not possibly have started his new firm so quickly if he had not stolen client information, he states that his policy has always forbidden the use of the company's data.

Unfortunately, the case between TCW Group and Gundlach is not an isolated incident. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigations, intellectual property theft, which is defined as robbing individuals of their creative expressions, ideas, inventions and data, is on the rise. The sharing of confidential information or stealing of trade secrets also falls under this umbrella.

Their company being the victim of intellectual property theft should be a major concern of human resources representatives. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, three-quarters of businesses in the U.S. have detected at least one cybercrime, while close to 60% have been the victim of more than one .

The possibility that one's company may be robbed from the inside is real, especially in today's economy where individuals feel less loyal to their employers than they may have in previous years. A recent study conducted by MetLife that was released in July 2011 revealed that, due to a decrease in the amount of benefits the workers receive from their companies, only 44 percent of employees feel a sense of loyalty toward their employer. This is a significant drop from 2008, when 62 percent of individuals stated that they felt very loyal to the businesses for which they worked. HR reps may wish to talk to their employees about changes to benefit plans in order to prevent this from happening in their companies.