Quinn Emanuel Secures Landmark Victory for IBM in High-Stakes Technology Dispute

We are delighted to announce that a London team, led by Kate Vernon and Gregory Pantlin, has secured a decisive victory for IBM UK in the UK High Court in a case that has significant implications for software licensing agreements in the technology sector.

In this high-profile matter—Mrs Justice O'Farrell ruled that Winsopia breached its contract with IBM UK and that its ultimate owners, Mr John Moores and LzLabs GmBH, procured that breach and participated in an unlawful conspiracy to do so.  They orchestrated what the Court found was a deliberate, systematic and intentionally hidden conspiracy to reverse engineer IBM's proprietary mainframe technology, representing billions in research and development investment.

The case centered on LzLabs' Software Defined Mainframe (SDM), which claimed to enable customers to run IBM mainframe applications outside IBM systems. Our team successfully demonstrated that LzLabs' UK subsidiary Winsopia had deliberately breached its software licence agreement after purchasing an IBM mainframe in 2013, using this access to unlawfully appropriate IBM's proprietary technology.  The Defendants were all held to have deliberately concealed their breaches of contract from IBM UK.

Throughout the nine-week trial, this QE team dismantled the defendants' claims of independent software development, proving conclusively that LzLabs, Winsopia, and tech entrepreneur John Moores (founder of BMC Software) had conspired to breach the contract in order to develop the SDM.  The Court also found that the conduct was deliberately concealed and so not time barred.

This landmark ruling not only protects IBM’s innovations but also reinforces the enforceability of software licensing restrictions in complex technology disputes—an issue of growing importance in today's digital economy.