Ever wonder what happens to all your "work" stuff you keep in the cloud after you leave your company? Debra Schatzki found out when Weiser Capital Management — now known as WeiserMazars Wealth Advisors, part of (you guessed it) WeiserMazars LLP — apparently hijacked her proprietary client list from the cloud:
Manhattan Federal Judge Robert Sweet ruled that Weiser Capital Management took wealth manager Debra Schatzki's valuable business records off the cloud without her permission and locked her out of her own database — a move that could cost the company millions of dollars when damages are decided at a civil trial next month.
The valuable records included years of personal financial information for 12,300 of Schatzki's clients, including high-net-worth real estate and architecture execs.
Here's what we gather happened: Debra had her own thing going in 2007 when she joined forces with Weiser, and things were cool. She and her company BBP Wealth kept an exclusive license to the junk she kept in the cloud with SmartOffice, which included all that crap on her 12,300 clients. HER clients, HER license, HER cloud, you with us?
Then things got weird and in 2010, Weiser told Debra to GTFO. That's fine, things don't always work out but then Weiser got straight up rude, kinda like when you break up with your boyfriend and he keeps all the good stuff you left at his house. Weiser accessed Deb's info, locked her out and moved it to another cloud! In other words, poor Deb was CLOUD-NAPPED! By her own former people!
"Weiser nearly destroyed my wealth management business," she said. Clearly she took it way better than Charlie Sheen takes any perceived affront.
Weiser's lawyer thinks it's really not that big of a deal, calling it “a plain, vanilla dispute about a customer list.”
