Claim No: IP-2021-000114 - [2023] EWHC 3153 (IPEC)

In early 2021 the Defendant, Mr Ludley, was employed as a recruitment agent by the Claimant, which is a specialist recruitment agency in the landscape, horticulture and gardening sector trading under the name ‘Cosmopolitan Recruitment’.

In late May and early June, unbeknownst to his employer, Mr Ludley began forwarding to his own accounts various of the Claimant’s documents and data. For example, on 17 May 2021 Mr Ludley emailed himself two of the Claimant’s spreadsheets, one entitled ‘Live Jobs’ and one entitled ‘Financials’ (“Claimant Spreadsheets”). On 21 May 2021 he used a third-party mail management account called MailChimp to export to himself various of the Claimant’s folders. These included a folder named ‘Campaigns’ which contained names, organisations and contact details of individuals who had received previous marketing campaigns of the Claimant (“Claimant Client List”).

On 16 June 2021 Mr Ludley gave the Claimant one week’s written notice of his resignation, stating in his letter that he had obtained an “alternative position in a larger company, with a managerial and training bias”. This was untrue. In fact, he intended to, and did a few days later on 21 June 2021, before his notice to the Claimant had expired, incorporate the Second Defendant Greenscape Specialist Recruitment Limited (“Greenscape”) as a vehicle for working as a recruitment agent on his own account. Mr Ludley is the sole director and the sole shareholder of the Second Defendant

On 27 June 2021, in what he described in oral evidence as “the stupidest thing I have done for at least 10 years”, Mr Ludley sent an email to over 500 client contacts from the Claimant Client List misrepresenting that the business of the Second Defendant was a new name for the business of the Claimant (“27 June Email”). This read as follows: