Legal news website Law360 is reporting that the legal battle between Retail FX broker ThinkMarkets and the ISAM Capital Markets Group has further heated up, with ThinkMarkets suing a former employee who recently left the company for ISAM’s IS Risk Analytics.

Separately, ThinkMarkets and ISAM are involved in another legal battle, stemming from ThinkMarkets’ 2017 sale of its B2B arm ThinkLiquidity to ISAM, to form ISAM unit IS Risk Analytics. ISAM is suing ThinkMarkets in UK court, claiming that ThinkMarkets is not sending its trades to ISAM group units for execution, as part of an exclusivity clause in the sale agreement.

In the latest legal salvo between the two companies, this time being filed in US court (U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois), ThinkMarkets unit TF Global Markets (Aust) Ltd. is suing former IT employee James Sorenson, alleging that he went to work for IS Risk Analytics taking with him proprietary information which he refuses to return.

ThinkMarkets is seeking preliminary and permanent injunctions against Mr. Sorenson, whom the company claims wrongfully and unlawfully obtained an email from ThinkMarkets’ legal director about litigation between it and the IS group, where as noted Mr. Sorensen now works. (Mr. Sorensen’s LinkedIn profile still shows him as a Senior Network Security Engineer at ThinkLiquidity, a position he has held since 2015).

The lawsuit claims that Mr. Sorenson was not a sender or recipient of the email in question, and he therefore had no legitimate reason to have it.

The lawsuit states that:

“ThinkMarkets is highly concerned that, among other things, Sorenson has disclosed or will disclose it to his new employer in order to, among other benefits, secure his new employment and otherwise harm ThinkMarkets.”

ThinkMarkets claims that Mr. Sorenson also has multiple other emails with confidential, sensitive information that he had no legitimate reason to possess, including communications between ThinkMarkets and its regulator in the UK as well as messages relating to ThinkMarkets’ efforts to launch new businesses in Japan and Australia.

The company alleges that as Mr. Sorenson was leaving the company, he deleted an IT repository in a proprietary application that stored proprietary code, doing so to harm the business.

James Sorenson resigned from ThinkMarkets without notice on October 2 of last year. Four days later, ThinkMarkets states that it sent him a letter asking him to return ThinkMarkets’ property and disclose his new employer to ThinkMarkets’ human resources. Mr. Sorenson never did either, the lawsuit says.

ThinkMarkets then said it learned in December that Mr. Sorenson was working for its competitor and litigation adversary IS group, specifically IS Risk Analytics.

The ThinkMarkets lawsuit further states:

“Given Sorenson’s deletion of a code repository shortly before his resignation, ThinkMarkets has every reason to believe that these emails are only the tip of the iceberg, and that in order to cover his tracks, Sorenson also likely has deleted many more emails that he never should have accessed.”

“Unless the relief requested herein is granted by the court, Sorenson will continue to wrongly and unlawfully possess, access, disclose, and/or use ThinkMarkets’ confidential, proprietary, competitive, sensitive, privileged, and/or trade secret information.”