Liberty Mutual Group Inc. is suing Bermuda-based Aspen Insurance Holdings Ltd., several Aspen subsidiaries and several of its own former employees, on charges that they conspired to steal Liberty Mutual's professional liability business, according to a report in Business Insurance.

In a suit filed this week in New York State Supreme Court, Boston-based Liberty Mutual said nine former employees who left Liberty Mutual last month to join Aspen "breached their duties of loyalty by helping Aspen steal from Liberty the infrastructure necessary to run a successful professional liability insurance operation in direct competition with Liberty".

The suit, which seeks compensatory and punitive damages, states: "Rather than build its own infrastructure through legal means, Aspen pilfered that necessary infrastructure from Liberty, its competitor, by inducing Liberty's employees to breach their duty of loyalty by, among other things, taking with them Liberty's confidential proprietary information and trade secrets."

Named as individual defendants in the lawsuit are Bruce Eisler, former senior vice-president in Liberty Mutual's professional liability division; Justin Camara, Rob Cunningham, Ross Goodman and Ross Herlands, all former vice-presidents in the division; Susan Dufresne and Judith Olivier, former assistant vice-presidents in the division; and Bryan Nogaki and Douglas Sifert, former underwriting specialists in the division.

The lawsuit says that Liberty began to create the unit that would offer professional liability insurance in 2000. According to the complaint, Mr. Eisler announced on January 14 he was resigning from his position at Liberty Mutual and that he was taking at least five other employees with him. Three additional members of the unit resigned "within days", the complaint states.

"Although the investigation continues, plaintiffs have already discovered Liberty e-mail correspondence between the individual defendants, which demonstrates that the defendants' coordinated efforts were launched well before the individual defendants resigned," according to the lawsuit.

The suit charges the defendants with breach of duty of loyalty; inducing, aiding and abetting breach of duty of loyalty; breach of contract; misappropriation of trade secrets; and unfair competition, among other charges.

In addition to damages, among other things, Liberty says it seeks to prevent all the defendants from using Liberty's confidential proprietary information, and to prohibit the individual defendants from providing services to any Liberty competitor, including Aspen, for 12 months.