Ryan Ori reports:
Commercial real estate brokerage Avison Young sued three brokers who recently left for another firm, accusing them of taking confidential information on their way out.
Avison Young alleges that industrial brokers Keith Puritz, Brett Kroner and Eric Fischer “downloaded massive amounts of data” from the firm before resigning to work at rival Cushman & Wakefield.
Read more on Crain’s.
I don’t have access to the complaint, which is described in the full article, but it doesn’t sound like there are any hacking charges even though they allegedly download information either in excess of their authorization or without authorization:
Before submitting their resignation, the brokers used external hard drives to download information regarding Toronto-based Avison Young’s clients, market intelligence, strategic plans and financial information, according to the complaint, filed Dec. 22 in Cook County Circuit Court.
I was previously employed in the securities industry and this sounds like a typical anti-competitive complaint where brokers are attempting to take client and other information in order to move clients to a new firm. Many FINRA firms used to participate in a reciprocal agreement where some of this client information was permitted to be taken by departing brokers, but most PII was protected. Prior to that agreement, we saw lots of suits similar to that described above.
Yeah, this still goes on all the time. I was curious to see whether it would involve civil complaint based on CFAA.