A Dallas-area digital marketing and SEO specialist has responded to a federal lawsuit filed against him last month by the law firm Eberstein Witherite that claimed he devised and installed a series of “digital backdoors” into the firm’s websites to divert potential client information to himself.
In a response filed this week, Qamar Zaman denied Eberstein Witherite’s allegations and filed a countersuit requesting a declaratory judgment that Eberstein Witherite owns none of the website copyrights, software code or information he created and submitted for clients.
The countersuit points out that the United States Copyright Act “provides that copyright ownership vests initially in the author or authors of the work.”
Eberstein Witherite sued Zaman April 17 on claims that Zaman misappropriated trade secrets, violated the Texas Theft Liability Act, harmfully accessed the firm’s computer and breached his fiduciary duty to the prominent personal injury firm. The lawsuit, originally filed in state court, was removed to federal court several days later.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Karen Gren Scholer granted an emergency joint motion by Eberstein Witherite and Zaman extending a temporary restraining order banning Zaman access to the Eberstein Witherite website and servers, and from using any information previously obtained. The TRO, which was originally set to expire at midnight on Thursday, will now expire after May 29.
A joint motion filed Wednesday by both sides says the parties are working with former U.S. District Judge Royal Ferguson as their mediator and that they are working together on a protective order that they will jointly file “in the coming days.”
Eberstein Witherite’s lawyers are Jeff Tillotson, Jonathan Patton and Joseph Irrobali of Tillotson Law. Zaman’s lawyers are Stephen Ross and Anthony Magee of Ross IP Group.
The Lawsuit
According to court records, Eberstein Witherite hired Zaman in December 2010 to design and maintain two of the firm’s websites: dallastexaspersonalinjurylawyers.com and 1800-car-wreck.com.
The firm also retained Zaman to provide SEO services and create a contact form for prospective clients visiting the website, which would be forwarded to the law firm for its attorneys for follow-up by one of its attorneys.
While he was retained, the lawsuit says, Eberstein Witherite provided Zaman with confidential and proprietary information and included him in internal discussions about business strategy and objectives.
Zaman terminated his work with Eberstein Witherite in August 2017 “after refusing to comply with plaintiff’s instructions relating to the installation and use of analytics on plaintiff’s various websites,” the lawsuit says.
In his countersuit, Zaman said he cut off all of his company’s access to Eberstein Witherite’s websites “upon completion of a transition period” after his August 2017 resignation. But Eberstein Witherite contends that Zaman continued accessing it as recently as March of this year.
The firm said it learned about the unauthorized intrusions in April when its current digital marketing company, Alan Morgan Group, discovered that Zaman had “installed a backdoor” into Eberstein Witherite’s websites with a hidden code that “allowed defendant persistent, surreptitious access to plaintiff’s websites and information,” the lawsuit says.
According to the lawsuit, AMG discovered that the information prospective clients were entering on the contact form was being diverted to an email address controlled by Zaman.
After further investigation, the lawsuit says, Eberstein Witherite also discovered that Zaman had embedded the code so deep “in the architecture” of the firm’s websites that it prevented “discovery or removal without compromising” the firm’s websites as a whole.
The firm also believes Zaman may be using the backdoor to manipulate Eberstein Witherite’s “online presence and footprint, resulting in extraordinary financial and reputational harm.”
According to Eberstein Witherite, Zaman could also be using the digital backdoor to provide prospective client information to other law firms that he has worked for.
“Plaintiff has come to learn that defendant’s misconduct is not a one-off occurrence,” Eberstein Witherite’s lawsuit says. “Instead, defendant has a history of defrauding his clients and refusing to release the code-framework for websites he has designed.”
Throughout his countersuit, Zaman contends that he was never an employee of Eberstein Witherite and “states that at all relevant times he was acting within the scope of his employment” by his company, Zaman Media LLC.
According to his company website, Zaman’s services are “trusted by more than 25,000 businesses worldwide.”