WASHINGTON, June 15 The U.S.
Supreme Court turned away on Monday a bid by India-based Tata Consultancy Services to overturn a $168 million award won against it by DXC Technology for allegedly stealing trade secrets related to life-insurance software
Tata had appealed after a lower court upheld a judge’s decision to set the award at $56 million in compensatory damages and $112 million in punitive damages to Ashburn, Virginia-based DXC. Tata had argued that the damages award could not be justified under U.S. law regarding trade secrets. DXC’s predecessor Computer Sciences Corp, or CSC, licensed its software to insurance company Transamerica in the 1990s.
Its 2019 lawsuit, filed in Dallas federal court, said that Tata hired 2,200 Transamerica employees and used their access to CSC’s software and knowledge of its proprietary information to build a competing life-insurance platform. Tata denied the allegations, told the court that the information at issue was not secret and argued that it accessed the software legally. A jury in 2023 decided in an advisory verdict – a nonbinding decision given to a judge – that Tata should pay DXC $210 million for willfully stealing its trade secrets.