The US Supreme Court has turned down Tata Consultancy Services' appeal seeking to overturn a $168 million damages award from DXC Technology in a trade secrets dispute. The India-based IT firm had contested the decision on grounds that the damages were not legally justified under US intellectual property law.
The damages comprised $56 million in compensatory payments and $112 million in punitive damages. DXC, headquartered in Ashburn, Virginia, brought the original lawsuit in Dallas federal court in 2019. The firm alleged that Tata hired approximately 2,200 Transamerica employees and leveraged their familiarity with DXC's proprietary life-insurance software to develop a rival platform.
DXC's predecessor, Computer Sciences Corp, had licensed the software to insurance company Transamerica during the 1990s. Tata maintained that it had accessed the technology lawfully and denied that the information qualified as trade secrets. A jury rendered an advisory verdict in 2023 recommending a $210 million payment, which US District Judge Brantley Starr subsequently reduced to $168 million in 2024. The New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed this reduction in 2025.
Tata argued before the Supreme Court that DXC should not have received damages based on unjust enrichment without demonstrating actual losses from the alleged misappropriation. The company also challenged the punitive damages component as disproportionate. Under US trade secrets law, damages can address both tangible losses and a defendant's wrongful gains from theft of proprietary information. The award to DXC relied entirely on the unjust enrichment standard.
DXC countered that the appeals court had appropriately applied settled legal principles to the specific facts of the case, requiring no further judicial review.
