'Fake It Until You Make It': Lawsuit Claims Hanzo Archives Pushed Fake AI Products to Law Firms
The whistleblower lawsuit claims Hanzo employees were manually conducting web searches for clients because its artificial intelligence platform was not functioning.
September 04, 2019 at 04:02 PM
3 minute read
A former employee's whistleblower lawsuit accuses e-discovery company Hanzo Archives of falsely promoting one of its products as running on artificial intelligence.
The lawsuit was filed by a former Hanzo Archives marketer who claims she and others were tasked with manually performing web searches for clients because the company's artificial intelligence platform was not functioning. The company would then manually input the investigation results into its customer portal to create the false appearance that they were generated by artificial intelligence, the suit claims. Meanwhile, senior Hanzo officials repeatedly warned the plaintiff not to tell clients about the manual investigations.
Courtney Subocz, a product director for the company's Dynamic Investigator product, claims she was fired after emailing colleagues to complain that the company's conduct amounted to consumer fraud.
Hanzo Archives promoted its Dynamic Investigator platform as being able to "supercharge digital investigations," and as using "powerful algorithms to search and analyze mountains of online data, identifying subjects across the web and social media sites." But Subocz said the company decided to start selling that product around November 2018, "long before Hanzo Dynamic Investigator was close to being able to function as advertised." At that point it had "no functioning artificial intelligence platform, nor any algorithms capable of analyzing any data, much less mountains of data," the suit claims.
Subocz claims various employees told her that if she did not give the sales department a product to sell, they would "create one for you," according to the suit, which describes Hanzo's product strategy as "fake it until you make it."
When Hanzo was hired to vet 219 potential jurors and to monitor social media postings of those jurors who were selected, the company falsely told its client that it was using artificial intelligence to perform the job. But the work was actually done manually by Subocz and other people working for Hanzo, the suit claims.
Subocz says she received multiple accolades from her employer for her job performance, as well as an Amazon gift card and assignments to speak on behalf of the company at various conferences. But she complained numerous times to senior managers about the fraudulent representations.
On March 12, at 9:55 a.m., Subocz expressed her objections in an email that she sent to the human resources director and several senior officials of the company. Within five minutes of sending the email, she was told by the human resources director and chief technology officer that her employment was being terminated effective immediately.
Subocz, a Brick Township resident, filed the suit in Ocean County Superior Court on July 23. Hanzo Archives, based in New York, its parent company, Hanzo Archives Limited, based in Great Britain, as well as the company's chief executive, Keith Laska, are named as defendants. The defendants removed the lawsuit to federal court in Trenton on Aug. 30.
The suit claims Subocz's firing was contrary to public policy and violated the New Jersey Conscientious Employee Protection Act. Subocz seeks compensatory and punitive damages as well as attorney fees and costs.
Subocz's suit was filed by Douglas Bramley of McMoran, O'Connor, Bramley & Burns in Manasquan, who declined to comment. Hanzo and its attorney, David Strand of Fisher & Phillips, did not respond to a request for comment.
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