No, probably not. Speak to any business owner who has been in a lawsuit and they'll likely tell you it's not worth the headache. A close relative told me that even if a customer straight up won't pay for a done job, he'd rather forgo the payment then deal with a lawsuit.
Lawsuits usually have:
1) monetary costs - those lawyers are very expensive
2) emotional costs - take a big mental toll to deal with
3) reputational costs - it goes in the public record. Next time a potential candidate googles your company, it might show up that you sued a former employee. Hopefully they read further to see if you were justified in doing so....
4) opportunity costs - you (hopefully) have better things to do with your time
If you are big enough, maybe you have a legal team to deal with this stuff. But even then, you have to choose your battles. A hired lawyer is still expensive and it's not worth going after small battles, even the ones you know you will win.
Also, as others have mentioned, it's not unreasonable to have a friend or relative look over your email communications during your interview process unless you were explicitly asked not to do so. In fact, it's a smart idea!
Never heard from them again.
It makes me wonder at what $ amount they would have begun to care about their error and tried to correct it.
I think it was about € 600. I spoke to a lawyer, may have written a letter threatening a lawsuit even, but the lawyer explained that it just wasn't enough to actually start a lawsuit over. Even if you win, lawsuits take a lot of time and energy. I just dropped it. And them, obviously.
A different case from the opposite side:
I'm currently looking at a disagreement with my previous phone provider. They charged me too much over the past year. I called them about it, and they wanted me to prove we agreed on the monthly fees I claimed, and not the ones they claim. But they can't claim we agreed on their fees, so I just stopped paying and switched to a different (better and cheaper) phone provider (which I should have done a long time ago anyway). They're threatening to cut my phone which already isn't with them. They want money from me, but yesterday I wrote them a letter explaining they actually owe me money.
I expect this will go away. They may register me somewhere as a bad-payer, but there's an appeal process that I expect will side with me, because the phone company can't prove a thing.
Several kinds and several counts of felonious fraud, all prosecutable, just for starters. If they signed their employment contract, which they most certainly did, that's perjury. If it was mailed back to the employer, that's mail fraud, a felony; if emailed, that's wire fraud. Position was remote, but if they ever entered the office, then as many counts of trespassing, at least, unless they took lunch and returned, which would double the number of counts. If they logged into anything, such as VPN, or Office 365, etc., each instance a separate count of computer fraud. The felonies here stack up high and rapidly. I'm not sure why you'd believe any mistakes made by the employer could possibly have any affect on the prosecutability of this and other similar criminals committing similar crimes.
That's news to me. I have always assumed the resumes I have been reading were written by the applicants themselves. I guess I was wrong.
Also, friends and family.
Why wouldn't you get the single most important document in the application process reviewed and rewritten?
