In many countries, the theft of trade secrets is a serious crime. In the US, for example, it carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a $5M fine. It’s unclear to me why this is a civil suit. It may have to do with the alleged activity taking place overseas.
It's a civil suit now, but has most likely been referred to the DOJ and US Attorney's Office for criminal investigation.
Best case scenario for Rippling: within 6 months the Deel board boots out the CFO & CEO. Shortly thereafter, several people involved on the U.S. side (and potentially their Irish spy) will be indicted for criminal violations of the Economic Espionage Act (notably Rippling has sued Deel for violating the Defend Trade Secrets Act, which provides for civil remedies). In their lawsuit, Rippling has classified their Sales and Marketing Strategy as "trade secrets" which is something that Deel will dispute given that marketing is inherently public. How that plays out criminally is another story, but chances are once the FBI digs into the Deel internal messages, they will find incriminating evidence. 1 or 2 of the Deel executives will plead guilty to conspiracy charges and get 1 year and 1 day. Deel, the corporation entity, will enter into a deferred prosecution agreement.
It's buried in the lawsuit, but Deel is implicated in sending payments overseas to Russia ostensibly in violation of international sanctions. In the Biden administration, this would have definitely interested a US Attorney, but not so much in this administration. Whether it has changed Rippling's strategy vis-à-vis best way to hurt Deel is another story. Perhaps they saw the possibility of Deel not facing punishment or press coverage over the Russia sanctions issue precisely because of the administration change and decided to play their other card: a spy.
Best case scenario for Deel: they covered their tracks internally by using auto-deleting Signal and theres no actual evidence of executives dictating what their alleged spy should be doing. They settle the lawsuit for several million dollars and politely apologize to Parker. Maybe there is a countersuit somewhere? Rippling has pursued this aggressively and confidently which hints that maybe there is some level of projection (i.e. they also had a spy in Deel). As for the criminal charges, if it gets to the point of an indictment of a C-level person, they will have lost, so Deel will need to hope someone low level was involved to pin it on.
