he may or may not be a genius, but he is using company computers to cheat his employer using a product he produced on company time, which, under intellectual property rights, belongs to the employer. Not clear in the article if he’s also using company time and computers to run his little video games but that’s no different than spending the day making personal phone calls.
Otoh, he could disclose his work product to the employer, and he could get a bonus or promotion for automating what appears to be a very menial job. Or he could get fired when the company does their annual IT forensic audit by independent sources, and make it onto the blacklist every FORTUNE 1000 HR dept has and kill any future career moves (and yes, you can bet your bippy they do keep lists). One can be sure that every law firm HR person that reads the article will now be on the hunt. Ripping off a law firm doesn’t seem a good risk reward scenario.
I can tell by the way that you think that you’re a lawyer. We all know that lawyers bill by the hour even though only if it takes him two minutes to do something like fill a template legal form with a clients information.
If the law firm goes to town on this innovator, I’d like to see the legal process blow up in their faces, bite them in the ass and eventually cause them to go out of business.
Is he being paid for his time, or for his skills/knowledge? If the latter, there is no cheating going on--he is fulfilling the task he was hired to do.
From my perspective, if he can write a single script to perform his position's job, he doesn't have much of a job, and I would not call him "IT"
I work in IT, and I automate parts of my job all the time. That automation has allowed my entire team to focus on other tasks that we are responsible for. (I automated a monthly process that used to take 5 people multiple full-time days every month to complete. I now do it, by myself, in less than 1/2 an hour per month.) That is only one example.