A U.S. district court jury in Wisconsin has found in Epic Systems' favor, awarding the EHR giant $940 million in damages in its trade secrets lawsuit against Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Services. The massive settlement seems likely to be reduced on appeal.
Epic's intellectual property suit against TCS, which is part of the enormous $109 billion Tata Group conglomerate, charged that employees of its American arm had "brazenly" downloaded technical documentation and other trade secrets for software it was helping install in Kaiser Permanente hospitals, using them to help improve its own hospital technology called Med Mantra.
The jury awarded Verona, Wisconsin-based Epic $700 million in punitive damages and $240 million in compensatory damages, according to a Reuters report – which noted that Epic officials declined to comment, but Tata officials immediately announced plans to appeal.
"The jury's verdict on liability and damages was unexpected as the company believes they are unsupported by the evidence presented during the trial," the Tata statement said. "The company did not misuse or derive any benefit from downloaded documents from Epic Systems' user-web portal."
The near-billion-dollar judgment looks likely to be reduced by the presiding judge, who questioned Epic's methodology for calculating damages – pointing out during the trial that it hadn't proved it was impacted to the extent it claimed, and had offered little evidence for how Tata was using Epic’s confidential information.
District Judge William M. Conley wrote that Epic had "swung for the fences" in asserting "far broader use of its confidential information than the facts now support."
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