Perkins Coie and Bracewell are facing allegations in New York state court that they allowed an electronic securities trading platform developer, Electron Trading LLC, to sign onto an unfavorable technology licensing agreement with Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, costing Electron tens of millions of dollars.
Electron, represented by Rachel Fleishman and Jeffrey Gross of Reid Collins & Tsai, lodged a legal malpractice complaint against the two firms late last week, alleging that Perkins Coie and Bracewell repeatedly failed to advise the company properly in connection with the Morgan Stanley contract. Under the deal, Electron granted Morgan Stanley the rights to the intellectual property on a technology system for “spread trades,” a form of trading in which investors simultaneously buy and sell related securities to try to capture price differences between multiple financial instruments.
