Interactive Brokers opposes trader’s attempt to amend complaint in software design case
A lawsuit brought by a customer of electronic trading major Interactive Brokers continues at the Connecticut District Court. In this case, 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.
On April 15, 2022, the broker filed its opposition to an attempt by the trader to amend his complaint. The document, seen by FX News Group, alleges that the plaintiff’s motion is belated and should be denied.
According to Interactive Brokers, the plaintiff, having realized that his motion for class certification is exceedingly weak,seeks to add a defective claim for attorneys’ fees and costs based on a new theory of reckless conduct.
Interactive Brokers argues that the Court should deny the motion because Plaintiff filed it long after the close of fact and expert discovery and because Plaintiff’s new quest for legal fees and costs based on allegations of supposedly reckless and wanton conduct would be futile in any event.
Although Plaintiff inexplicably requests that this motion be decided before his motion for class certification, which is not yet fully briefed, he makes no effort to identify any impact that his proposed amendments would have on his class certification motion. Further, if class certification is denied, Plaintiff must pursue his claims, if he chooses to proceed, in contractual arbitration.
Plaintiff’s proposed additions to his complaint are untimely, Interactive Brokers says, adding that most of the allegations in the proposed amended complaint are either entirely unsupported by the discovery Defendants provided in this case or based on discovery about innocuous matters that has been known or available to Plaintiff for years.
Allowing Plaintiff to add these allegations now would require Defendants to incur the costs of filing a third motion to dismiss and conducting additional discovery Plaintiff’s proposed additions in the PTAC are also futile because the entire and open purpose of Plaintiff’s new allegations is to supposedly support a new demand for attorneys’ fees and costs as punitive damages, and that demand is defective as a matter of law.
Interactive Brokers concludes that even if Plaintiff were permitted to add these new allegations, they would be subject to dismissal as deficient to maintain a claim for fees and costs as punitive damages under Connecticut law.
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. On September 28, 2016, the Court dismissed Plaintiff’s complaint in its entirety.
Ever since, the complaint has been revived and the parties have argued about discovery. Lately, these disputes have been focused on access to source code.