Claim No: IL-2025-000064 - [2025] EWHC 2545 (Ch)

In summary, the defendant's position is that the claimants are not entitled to injunctive relief of the nature, or the length, sought, in circumstances where the defendant did not have access to (or, indeed, security clearance to access) downstream ‘alpha’ code. The reformulated issue 8 looks specifically at how Humber itself was developed. If work on Humber was largely undertaken by teams which excluded the defendant (as he alleges), then whatever material relating to Humber he may have had within his possession will have been largely valueless, because it would have been early stage, upstream, code, which bears no resemblance to Humber as it was actually developed or deployed. The defendant is confident that documentary evidence of the nature sought by the newly reformulated issue 8 will be available.

The new issue 8 is said to be central to the defendant's case. He does not deny having misappropriated GR Information. The central issue for the court at trial will therefore be to identify the relief to which the claimants are entitled. The defendant's position is that they will be entitled to minimal relief, in circumstances where, put simply, he poses no (or only minimal) danger to the claimants' business. If he could never have posed any danger to the claimants' business (even prior to the deletion of the GR Information from his accounts and devices), then that submission will have great force behind it. It also has a bearing on his outstanding discharge application, and the propriety and proportionality of all the steps the claimants have taken thus far in the litigation. Being ‘central’ to the dispute, it is appropriate that the claimants should be ordered to provide disclosure on the model D basis (again citing Lombard North Central).

The claimants object to the inclusion of this issue (as originally formulated) because they say that it has no bearing on the dispute whatsoever. It is precisely the type of wild goose chase that will obscure the real issues in the case, and place an unnecessary burden on the parties (and the court), with the attendant danger of disruptive satellite disputation. The proposed issue has no relevance to any of the factual issues in dispute. The defendant is said to relies upon paragraph 21 of his defence (at section 1A to his disclosure review document). This passage is said to disclose no dispute of fact which could found a proper or appropriate issue for disclosure. Accordingly, the claimants say that the court should not include this issue in the approved disclosure review document.

I note that paragraph 21 of the defence (read in conjunction with paragraph 20) pleads a tabular ‘linear approximation’ of the tiers applied in the development process of trading strategies “that was, in practice, disjointed”. It pleads, in vague, generic terms, that the output of the defendant’s data science team (and the defendant’s own contributions) was often diluted by, or substituted in favour of, contributions made by other data science teams. Where this happened, the end product of the early stages was unknown to the defendant. Moreover, it is pleaded that it was not uncommon for quantitative researchers to merge research projects relating to one potential trading strategy into the development process of another (without reference to the data scientists), thereby limiting the defendant’s knowledge and understanding of the characteristics of a given trading strategy (even at the early stages).

The claimants expand upon their submissions (in relation to the original formulation of issue 8) in the document they filed last Friday. They submit that issue 8 is not a proper issue for disclosure for the following reasons:

First, at its core, the claimants’ case is simple: the defendant knows the essential details of the extremely confidential and valuable trading strategy known as ‘Humber’ and, unless the court intervenes, he will use that information to help a competitor to replicate Humber, or there is a grave risk of this. The claimants remind the court of the submissions of Mr Craig KC at pages 144-150 of the transcript of the 18 September 2025 hearing; the evidence at paragraph 42 of the defendant’s 2^nd witness statement;the commentary upon that evidence at paragraph30 (a) of Mr Sinclair’s 5^th witness statement; and the defendant’s own repeated assertions, in contemporaneous, documents that he could (and would) ‘replicate’ Humber (as reproduced at paragraph 5 of the claimants’ skeleton argument for the 18 September hearing).

The idea or rationale behind a trading strategy is said to be of crucial importance. So, even if it is the case that the defendant did not steal (and is unaware of) all of the details of how Humber is implemented, that does not alter the fact that what the defendant did have access to (whether such access was authorised or not), and what he did steal, would allow a competitor to replicate Humber in its essential parts. Consequently, that information is of enormous value, and any further misuse or unauthorised disclosure thereof threatens to cause huge damage to the claimants.

Further, as was conceded by the defendant’s counsel in oral submissions, the defendant stole valuable confidential information: see page 133 of the transcript, line 18. Further still, it was also conceded by the defendant that the question of whether information is valuable is simply not a necessary element of whether it is confidential: see page 31 of the transcript, lines 13-20. It may be the case that the issue of the value to be placed upon the confidential information is relevant to the assessment of damages for breach of confidence, or as to the suitability of a remedy, such as the injunction sought by the claimants to prevent the defendant working for a period for a competitor. However, there is no doubt that the information which the defendant stole is valuable. The value of Humber as a trading strategy is significant, as the defendant himself well knows (as evidenced by the figure the defendant himself set out in the confidential schedule to the particulars of claim). Further, it is obvious that the information is highly confidential because: (i) the defendant stole it, and in doing so went to considerable effort to evade the claimants’ security measures; (ii) the claimants have gone to great lengths and expense to protect it; and (iii) there is no evidence that any of the parties are not rational actors.

It follows that disclosure evidencing ‘material contributions’ (or, presumably, work undertaken) to Humber is simply irrelevant to the issues in dispute. The defendant knows the strategy, irrespective of the extent to which he was involved in creating each component part of it. Accordingly, any documents responsive to the proposed issue 8 would have no probative value one way or the other. That is no doubt why the agreed list of issues for trial makes no reference to ‘contributions’ (or ‘work undertaken’) to Humber, or to the ‘incorporation’ of other research into Humber.

Second, the defendant appears to contend that the disclosure of issue 8 documents is necessary because they go to the value of the relevant confidential information. This is not a centrally relevant issue. It is in any event hardly a question that is in any real doubt. Further, it is not a sound basis for including issue 8 in the disclosure review document for two reasons: (i) The fact that other people may know other information about Humber is logically irrelevant to the value of the information that the defendant knows and/or stole. It is the absolute value of the information that the defendant knows that is relevant; not its relative value as compared to other categories of information known by others. (ii) In any event, the parties have already agreed the scope of disclosure to be given in respect of value pursuant to agreed issue 6, and the specific categories of documents listed in rows 8-10 of section 1B of the disclosure review document. Accordingly, the inclusion of proposed issue 8 (or indeed issue 4) to also deal with value would be duplicative, unduly granular and complex, and contrary to the clear guidance given by Sir Geoffrey Vos C in McParland (at paragraphs 47 and 56-57).

Third, it is far from clear what searches the claimants would be expected to undertake in respect of, and what documents might exist that are responsive to, the proposed issue 8. The claimants have already agreed to give disclosure of messages from the Humber Slack Channel (i.e. the internal communications system predominantly used by the claimants) that are relevant to value. It is unclear what else the defendant is looking for. The defendant’s formulation is broad and vague; and he appears to have made no attempt to comply with the principle that the parties should start by considering what documents are actually likely to exist before formulating issues for disclosure: see McParland at paragraph 46 (explaining that the issues for disclosure are “only those key issues in dispute, which the parties consider will need to be determined by the court with reference to contemporaneous documents in order for there to be a fair resolution of the proceedings”) and paragraph 56 (emphasising that “The parties need to start by considering what categories of documents likely to be in the parties’ possession are relevant to the contested issues before the court.”). Issue 8 is precisely the type of wild goose chase that the disclosure regime under PD 57AD is intended to avoid. It will obscure the real issues, and make disclosure unnecessarily time-consuming and burdensome (potentially for both parties), particularly in the context of an expedited timetable to trial.

Fourth, the court is invited to note that the defendant seeks disclosure (particularly by subparagraph (3) of the originally formulated issue 8) of documents concerning research that he was not privy to during the course of his employment. In other words, he seeks, through these proceedings, to obtain yet further confidential information belonging to the claimants, beyond that which he already knows, or has previously managed to steal. That is of real concern to the claimants in light of the defendant’s admitted theft of, and propensity to misuse, such information. In that context, the court is invited to approach the defendant’s disclosure requests with an appropriate degree of caution. Given that the information sought is at very best of peripheral relevance to the actual dispute, the risk of the defendant misusing the information obtained through disclosure is a further factor that should militate against the inclusion of proposed issue 8.

In the email which accompanied their most recent filed submissions, the claimants say that the revised formulation of issue 8 suffers from all the same problems as the original formulation. What matters is the confidentiality, and value, of the information stolen by the defendant; the ‘work on Humber’ undertaken by others has no bearing on the issues in the case. Accordingly, the claimants invite the court to reject this new version of issue 8 for the same reasons they set out in their accompanying written submissions.

In my judgment, the claimants overstate the position when they assert that, on the defendant’s own evidence, it would be possible for a competitor who is told the essence of the trading strategy to engineer their own code to implement it. At paragraph 42 of his 2^nd witness statement, the defendant concludes: