Millennium slams Jane Street ‘gamesmanship’ in secrets case

Jane Street on Friday filed a revised lawsuit in the case dropping its request for an order barring the defendants from using its strategy.

Millennium Management accused Jane Street Group of playing games by not fully disclosing the proprietary trading strategy it claims was stolen by two former traders who joined Izzy Englander’s hedge fund group.

On Friday, a lawyer for Millennium and ex-Jane Street traders Douglas Schadewald and Daniel Spottiswood complained in a letter to the judge that Jane Street still hasn’t adequately identified the strategy in court filings.

“This gamesmanship is directly at odds with Jane Street’s promise to provide the court and defendants with fair notice of its purported trade secret,” the lawyer, Andrew Levander, wrote to US District Judge Paul Engelmayer. Levander asked the judge to order Jane Street to submit a disclosure to the court and defense by April 30.

Speculation has swirled around the strategy since Jane Street filed its April 12 suit. The firm’s description in its complaint was heavily redacted, but the strategy was called “immensely valuable.” At an April 19 hearing before Engelmayer, it inadvertently emerged that the strategy concerns options trading in India and generated $1 billion in profit for Jane Street.

Deborah Brown, a lawyer for Jane Street, in a Friday court filing urged the court to deny Millennium’s request for a disclosure order as unreasonable and prejudicial.

Jane Street claims it knew Schadewald and Spottiswood were using the strategy at Millennium because it experienced a 50% drop in profits that could only be attributable to “the entrance of a competitor using the same strategy.”

Levander criticized Jane Street for asking Millennium to turn over trading data before specifying its trade secrets itself. “This asymmetry would allow Jane Street to define its alleged ‘trade secret’ to fit Millennium’s trading data,” the lawyer said.

At the April 19 hearing, Engelmayer denied Jane Street’s request for a temporary order barring Millennium, Schadewald and Spottiswood from using Jane Street’s strategy but set an expedited case schedule and a July trial date.

Jane Street on Friday filed a revised lawsuit in the case dropping its request for an order barring the defendants from using its strategy. Brown said in court filing earlier this week that a July trial was “unrealistic” given the amount of evidence that needed to be gathered. She suggested next year instead.

Making the defendants live with the case for another year was “neither fair nor justified,” Levander wrote. “Jane Street’s lawsuit has tarnished the reputations, and put at significant risk the livelihoods, of two traders who have not done anything wrong and who are eager to clear their names. And the lawsuit has cast a shadow on Millennium.”

Millennium, Schadewald and Spottiswood deny using Jane Street trade secrets, and defense lawyers at the April 19 hearing further suggested that the strategy at issue in the wasn’t all that secret.

The case is Jane Street Group LLC v Millennium Management LLC, 24 cv 02783, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).