You have just finished a six-month investigation of an embezzlement fraud for the Muerto insurance agency. From the very beginning, Tom Cans was your main suspect. Mr. Cans served as a general accountant until he was fired right before your investigation began. You were never able to interview him because his lawyer would not permit it, but you managed to find a series of bank deposits in which Mr. Cans had stripped off the cash and threw the checks away. Your careful investigation of the accounting records revealed that Mr. Cans had credited many customers for their policy payments, but had never deposited the money in the bank. To prove this, you had the bank send you image copies of all deposit slips in recent years. You compared these deposit slips to credits that Mr. Cans had made to customers' accounts. There was no question that Mr. Cans had made the customer credits because the audit log showed that they had all been made with Mr. Cans's login and were mixed in with legitimate transactions also made by him. Given this strong evidence, you indicate in your report that there was strong evidence of fraud. You did not specifically point to Mr. Cans as the culprit, but it was clear that theinvestigation only centered on his activities. As soon as you filed your investigative report with Muerto, Muerto immediately filed suit against Mr. Cans, and the suit included a copy of your report. Only a week after that, Mr. Cans filed suit against you for defamation.

Required

Is there anything you could have, or should have, done differently? Do you think that Cans has a possibility of winning his defamation suit against you? Explain.