Andover company claims corporate espionage


The Eagle Tribune
ANDOVER — A small Brickstone Square company is accusing a huge, Chicago-based financial services company of using high-tech robots to scan proprietary documents in a secure database and then using the information to steal its clients.

NewRiver Inc., 200 Brickstone Square, filed a lawsuit yesterday in Salem Superior Court alleging that Morningstar Inc., a $1.6 billion company, viewed tens of thousands of pages of documents using "screen scraping" technology, copying them and then using them to woo potential clients from NewRiver.

"We found out about this in early December," said Russell Planitzer, CEO of NewRiver. "We notified them before Christmas they were doing this. We went out to Chicago to see if we could resolve this. When we showed them, I thought they'd say, 'We'll never do this again.'"

Instead, they said, in effect, "We're not afraid of you," said Planitzer, who has headed up the $30 million company for three years.

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