Nine former employees and rival property-casualty insurer Aspen Insurance Holdings are the subject of a suit filed by Liberty Mutual, alleging a conspiracy to steal professional liability insurance business.

Filed Feb. 1 in New York State Supreme Court, the suit alleges the former employees of the Liberty International Underwriters (LIU) unit, based in New York, “unlawfully conspired (and continue to conspire) to breach of duties of loyalty owed to Liberty, raid Liberty’s business operations, and misappropriate Liberty’s trade secrets and goodwill,” according to a copy of the complaint.

“While being paid by Liberty to protect the assets it had built at substantial cost over the course of some ten years, the Individual defendants 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 contends.

Named as defendants in the case, along with Aspen, which is operated by a Bermuda-based holding company, are former Liberty employees Bruce Eisler, Ross Herlands, Justin Camara, Ross Goodman, Rob Cunningham, Judith Olivier, Douglas Sifert, Bryan Nogaki and Susan Dufresne. All nine worked for Liberty until “abrupt” resignations between Jan. 14 and 20, according to the suit, and all had access to company information.

Eisler serves as a senior vice president for LIU’s Professional Liability Division, working out of New York, and supervising six fellow defendants.

The suit alleges that Eisler “communicated and met with” the president of Aspen Insurance Holding Limited’s U.S. insurance division, William F. Murray, “in order to plan his resignation.”

‘En mass’ departure

Liberty Mutual claims that starting in December 2009, its nine former employees communicated about their plan to leave the insurer and in an attempt to hide that fact from their employer, “refrained from using their Liberty email for such communications.” The suit alleges that early that month, Eisler asked Cunningham and Herlands for their home e-mail addresses, but Liberty Mutual said it has not looked at the defendants’ home computers and private email accounts to learn the specifics of their communications.

Upon his resignation Jan. 14, Eisler announced to Liberty Mutual “that he was taking” at least five other employees from the LIU Professional Liability Division with him, the suit states, and turned in resignation letters for Cunningham, Camara, Goodman, Herlands and Sifert. The other three resigned within the next six days.

“The en masse departure of nine key employees of LIU’s professional liability insurance unit was clearly the result of Aspen’s conspiracy with Eisler and/or the other individual defendants – who at the time were still employed by Liberty – to recruit the Liberty employees whom they supervised,” the suit states. “The purpose of the conspiracy is clear: to move the necessary infrastructure for a successful professional liability insurance operation-including personnel, confidential proprietary information and trade secrets-from LIU to Aspen, so that Aspen, without expending the time and funds necessary to lawfully develop a competitive professional liability insurance business, could nonetheless compete against Liberty sooner than it would be able to otherwise, and at a time when Liberty’s ability to compete would be weakened by the departure of key employees.”