TCS had argued the damages were unjustified under US trade secrets law and that DXC did not prove actual losses, but the appeal was turned away.
The U.S. Supreme Court
turned away on Monday a bid by India-based Tata Consultancy
Services to overturn a $168 million award won against
it by DXC Technology for allegedly stealing trade
secrets related to life-insurance software.
Tata had appealed after a lower court upheld a judge’s
decision to set the award at $56 million in compensatory damages
and $112 million in punitive damages to Ashburn, Virginia-based
DXC. Tata had argued that the damages award could not be
justified under U.S. law regarding trade secrets.
DXC’s predecessor Computer Sciences Corp, or CSC, licensed
its software to insurance company Transamerica in the 1990s. Its
2019 lawsuit, filed in Dallas federal court, said that Tata
hired 2,200 Transamerica employees and used their access to
CSC’s software and knowledge of its proprietary information to
build a competing life-insurance platform.
Tata denied the allegations, told the court that the
information at issue was not secret and argued that it accessed
the software legally.
A jury in 2023 decided in an advisory verdict – a nonbinding
decision given to a judge – that Tata should pay DXC $210
million for willfully stealing its trade secrets. U.S. District
Judge Brantley Starr reduced the proposed damages award to $168
million in 2024. The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals upheld Starr’s decision in 2025.
U.S. law concerning trade secrets allows for monetary
damages to address both a plaintiff’s losses from the theft of
trade secrets and a defendant’s “unjust enrichment” from it. The
award to DXC was based entirely on unjust enrichment.
Tata told the Supreme Court in a filing that DXC should not
have won unjust enrichment damages without proving it suffered
actual losses as well. Tata also argued that the punitive
damages award was excessive.
DXC responded that “nothing about the court of appeals’
fact-bound application of settled law warrants further review.”
Published on June 15, 2026
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