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The Case of Marathon Asset Management and Seddon and Bridgeman [2017] EWHC 300 (Comm) CL 2013-000689
Many of us might be forgiven for thinking that one of the basic tenets of English law is that a claimant should be recompensed only for losses suffered.
“The claimants ("Marathon") carry on an investment management business. A long-running dispute between the firm's three founders led to one of them leaving, followed by employees who worked with him. They have since set up a competing business. Protracted arbitration proceedings and this litigation have ensued. The arbitration claims have all now been resolved and some of the claims made in this action have been settled. But there remain claims against the first defendant ("Mr Seddon") and the third defendant ("Mr Bridgeman") for taking confidential documents. Those claims have been the subject of this trial.”
The core of this dispute was that Mr Bridgeman, when a Marathon employee, copied some 40,000 Marathon documents onto USB drives (including some 37,000 emails), in the period before he left that employment.