How an American tech company won a $25 million lawsuit with fake emails

Imagine that you’re a lawyer, a partner at a powerhouse firm in the US, who has just spent the last three years litigating an intellectual property case against a South Korean company in a Texas court. Imagine that you finally plowed through a six-day jury trial involving key e-mails as evidence, then imagine that you won a $25 million payday for your clients. Time to celebrate? Sure, until you find out that your three years of work relied in part on a series of faked e-mails that your own client had purposely created—and that the FBI was investigating. Now imagine how quickly you might want out of the whole matter. The battle of the acronyms began back in August 2011, when LBDS Holding Company sued South Korean company ISOL Technology over magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tech. An MRI can produce incredible interior images of the body, but the technique famously requires the patient to remain still—a problem when trying to image the always-beating human heart. LBDS said it had developed “highly confidential, proprietary technology” to solve the problem, which was to have been incorporated into ISOL MRI machines, imported into the US, and sold under LBDS’ private label.