Horror Stories

The Dentist's Scedule

A friend of mine, Jon, had just opened his own law firm. By some miracle he managed to land a pretty big fish for a client. Unfortunately for him, he didn't have the resources to really deal with the case. The lawsuit regarded a property management company and a strip mall occupied by several businesses some of which worked with the confidential documents of their customers.

The client claimed that the management company entered the property without permission, after hours and read or otherwise accessed sensitive information. They then used this information for various, nefarious purposes (that were never explained to me and probably never existed). My opinion of the whole thing was that some people were mad about the management company coming into their offices and thought they could get more money if the management company looked through their file cabinets.

Part of the review, aside from sifting through tens of thousands of emails and financial documents, was to review footage from surveillance cameras that the management company turned over to Jon as part of his discovery request. There was hundreds of hours of tape, and Jon could not possibly watch it all in time for trial (and still do the rest of his job).

Enter unemployed lawyer friends. Jon was fortunate to know me and four other unemployed lawyers and to have a client willing to pay them, (keep in mind, if the client could show the management company looked through one sensitive document it would be like hitting the jackpot when it came time for damages to be awarded). There were five offices with sensitive areas and the footage was broken up between the five of us (Jon did not participate in order to give us, his friends, some much needed cash infusion and to do his real job).

The period of time in which the claimed activity took place was during the night but not every office in the building closed at the same time. For example, the CPA that occupied Suite 3 kept his business open late January through April 15th to handle the excess work during tax season .

The way the cameras worked was that during normal business hours, (9 am to 7 pm), the cameras were shut off to save room on the storage device and to maintain privacy. After 7pm, they were activated only by motion sensors. The fact that some of the offices were open and the cameras were capturing potentially sensitive material was another aspect of the lawsuit.

The period of time for all video footage was approximately five years, but because it was such a limited amount of actual filming time for the cameras there was only a few hundred hours of footage. Each suite had three cameras and, in order to make it easier for me and the other reviewers to learn all the important players (and thus know who wasn't supposed to be in the suite after hours) we were each assigned a suite.

I was assigned to Suite 5, the corner office in the strip. It was a medical office with a camera over reception, one in the examination room (which always seemed odd to me until someone told me how much the equipment there was worth) and one in the records room between the examination room and the reception area. The office was set up such that the reception was at the front of the building with a door leading out to the parking lot, behind it was a hallway with the records room and the examination room each opening to the left side. There was no camera in the hallway and, besides the front door, the only exit was a fire door at the back of the hallway.

Why was this job so terribly boring if the camera only came on when there was movement, you ask? Well, the extremely intelligent and hard working receptionist who worked in Suite 5 loved celebrating holidays. She would do so by hanging things from the drop ceiling on paperclip hooks and strings. She had one for every holiday to decorate her area in reception, hearts for valentines day, witches for halloween, etc. etc. These decorations would flutter slightly when the air conditioner or the heat turned on and activate the cameras (usually for about forty-five minutes to an hour).