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.

Wait, you can't fake e-mails as evidence?

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. According to LBDS, ISOL instead used its technology without authorization and sold it under its own name—an alleged breach of contract and a theft of trade secrets.

In March 2014, both parties embarked on a six-day jury trial in a Texas federal court. Within a few hours of the trial's conclusion, the jury had a returned a verdict in favor of LBDS. ISOL would have to pay $24,414,068 to cover lost profits along with another $760,693—a cool $25 million in total.

Fast forward to this month, when ISOL filed a post-trial "Emergency Motion for Sanctions" in which it dropped a bombshell claim: an anonymous source said that LBDS had used "manufactured and forged documents" as pieces of evidence in the court battle between the two companies.

Many of these documents were said to be e-mails. According to ISOL, LBDS registered the domain cernerinc.com and then simply created bogus e-mails using the names of real Cerner Corporation employees. (Cerner Corporation is a real healthcare company, but its actual domain name is cerner.com). Those e-mails were then used as key elements in the lawsuit against ISOL.

"LBDS manufactured documents to defraud and manipulate a foreign company and then used those documents as its primary evidence in prosecuting its claims against the same company and its employees," ISOL lawyers wrote. "It is difficult to imagine a greater abuse of the civil justice system."

LBDS was represented by well-known national law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, and Akin Gump immediately called its client to find out if the accusations had any merit.

On May 15, one day after learning about the sanctions motion, Akin Gump partner Sanford Warren got LBDS execs on the phone... and they admitted that the allegations were "essentially correct."

"Those on the call had set up a fictitious domain name and sent e-mails from that domain name to create the impression that certain e-mails, introduced into evidence at the trial of this case, were sent by Cerner Corporation, when in fact they were not," Warren wrote in a filing with the court.

Warren tried to persuade his clients, both on the call and in a followup letter, to admit this to the court, but he noted that "LBDS has not done so." So, on May 21, Warren did so himself as required by the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct. He also asked the judge to let Akin Gump withdraw. Akin Gump wants nothing to do with the whole mess, especially after finding out that the FBI is now investigating the situation.

A little skepticism goes a long way

Writing about the whole mess at Above the Law, lawyer Joe Patrice notes that there's little lawyers can do to verify that the documents their own clients produce in discovery are genuine, especially when it comes to these sorts of bogus e-mails.

The moral of the story is to be ever vigilant. If you think the kind of shadiness described in this motion can’t happen with “Biglaw clients,” you’re wrong. It’s just much more sophisticated and harder to detect when a deeper pocket decides to play fast and loose with the facts. A partner once warned me during a document collection in a white-collar case, “Remember you’re dealing with the criminal f**king element.” Not that we necessarily thought our client was a wrongdoer or that we weren’t prepared to offer a zealous defense, but he meant that when gathering documents from someone accused of a crime they are either innocent, knowingly guilty, or in denial, and two out of those three demand a skeptical approach to gathering facts.

This whole ordeal might have been avoided had that "skeptical approach" been taken up front. For instance, looking up Cerner Corporation would have shown its domain to be cerner.com, and a "whois" search would have revealed legitimate contact information for the Missouri-based company. Cernerinc.com, by contrast, was a different domain that had its contact details obscured through Domains by Proxy. Some tough questions about this disparity might have saved everyone on both sides years of effort.