Electronic trading major Interactive Brokers has clashed with one of its former customers, Robert Scott Batchelar, regarding the depositions in a lawsuit alleging the broker committed engineering negligence.

Documents filed with the Connecticut District Court reveal that Interactive Brokers seeks a protective order forbidding the apex deposition of Thomas Peterffy, the Chairman of the Board and former Chief Executive Officer of Interactive Brokers Group, Inc. (“IBKR”).

In this lawsuit, Robert Scott Batchelar accuses Interactive Brokers, LLC of negligent design of its trading software, so that an automatic liquidation of the positions in his account cost him thousands of dollars more than it should have.

Let’s note that Batchelar commenced this lawsuit in December 2015 by filing a complaint asserting claims for breach of contract, negligence, and commercially unreasonable liquidation of pledged collateral. Batchelar states that his current theory of liability is that Interactive Brokers’ Auto-Liquidation Software was negligently designed, coded, maintained and used such that it permitted a liquidation transaction to be executed on terms less favorable to the customer than the terms for that liquidation transaction authorized by the Auto-Liquidation Software.

Interactive Brokers explains that Batchelar has only one remaining claim in this action after all his other claims were dismissed with prejudice and that claim is for alleged engineering negligence. Batchelar alleges that IBKR’ broker-dealer margin management software, or automated liquidation code, was improperly designed, implemented, and maintained and that an unintentional coding error resulted in malfunction. The plaintiff has already taken seven depositions, including the depositions of senior engineers responsible for the software at issue.

The broker notes that the Chairman did not design, implement, program, or maintain IBKR’s automated liquidation software at any point during the class period. IBKR employs over 700 software engineers including those with responsibility for the liquidation software. The Chairman was not involved in the creation of the software.

The Chairman thus does not have unique personal knowledge about this claim and the engineers who have already been deposed are far more knowledgeable about the automated liquidation software. He has no knowledge at all about the alleged unintentional coding error or the claimed malfunction.

Rather, his focus was, and has always been, on the high-level operation and management of IBKR – commensurate with the role and duties of public company senior management for a financial institution that employs thousands of employees and services millions of accounts.

Nonetheless, on May 7, 2025, class counsel served notice of the Chairman’s deposition for July 9, 2025.

On June 6, 2025, there was a case management and discovery conference call. The call made it clear that Mr Peterffy’s deposition remains a point of disagreement.