A British insurance conglomerate launched a synchronized holiday raid on a Massachusetts competitor, coordinating through encrypted WhatsApp channels with disappearing messages enabled and the self-designated moniker “Seal Team 6.” Approximately 200 employees departed Brown & Brown during Christmas week 2025, working through the weekend to secure broker-of-record transfers before courts could reopen and injunctions could issue. The question now is who gets to keep it.
The Gold They Came to Take
In David O. Russell’s Three Kings, a band of American soldiers identifies an arbitrage window in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War ceasefire. The fighting has stopped, authority is distracted, and a bunker full of Kuwaiti gold sits inadequately guarded in the Iraqi desert. The soldiers assemble a small team, plan a quick extraction, and assume they will be gone before anyone understands what happened. What they discover, over the course of a brutal education, is that extraction is never as clean as it appears on the whiteboard. The gold has weight. The context follows you home.
The insurance brokers who allegedly departed Brown & Brown during Christmas week 2025 may be learning a similar lesson. The complaint filed in Suffolk Superior Court describes approximately 200 employees coordinating through WhatsApp with disappearing messages enabled, timing their mass resignation to exploit court closures, and referring to themselves in internal communications as “Seal Team 6.” The goal was to secure signed broker-of-record letters before Brown & Brown could mobilize a legal response, transferring client relationships to their new employer, Howden US Services, in a single synchronized extraction. The operation had the hallmarks of a job planned by people who had watched too many heist films: encrypted communications, operational security protocols, a ticking clock, and the conviction that speed defeats accountability.
What the operators apparently failed to research was the terrain. Massachusetts has spent seven years constructing a legal architecture specifically designed to punish the conduct they were planning, and the penalties multiply in ways that other jurisdictions do not permit.
The Silence in the Bunker
When Howden’s defense team filed their opposition to Brown & Brown’s preliminary injunction motion, they constructed an elaborate narrative around employee dissatisfaction and voluntary departure. What the brief did not do was mention Governo Law Firm LLC v. Bergeron, the 2021 Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision that governs precisely the conduct alleged in the complaint. Attorneys tracking the case noticed immediately. The omission was not oversight; it was triage.
The Governo decision answered a question that had divided Massachusetts courts: does Chapter 93A, the state’s unfair and deceptive practices statute, apply to disputes between employers and departing employees? The Supreme Judicial Court held that when employees misappropriate proprietary materials during employment and subsequently deploy them in marketplace transactions, the conduct becomes actionable under the consumer protection framework. The distinction matters enormously, because Chapter 93A permits doubling or tripling of compensatory damages and mandates attorneys’ fee awards to prevailing plaintiffs. The same conduct that might generate a modest contract judgment in Texas can produce an eight-figure catastrophe in Massachusetts.
Howden’s brief engaged with none of this. The silence read as confession: the precedent was too damaging to distinguish, and engagement would only highlight the exposure. In Three Kings, the soldiers enter the bunker without knowing what guards remain inside. Howden’s lawyers entered Suffolk Superior Court apparently hoping the judge would not notice the weapon mounted on the wall.
Judge Debra Squires-Lee, who will preside over the preliminary injunction hearing, has already demonstrated familiarity with that weapon. Her 2024 decision in Windrose Advisors v. Haase denied a motion to dismiss Chapter 93A claims in a factually parallel case. The Cynosure verdict from Judge Patti Saris provides the damages template: a competitor orchestrated the departure of 26 salespeople, the jury awarded $25.225 million, and Saris subsequently doubled the compensatory damages while characterizing the conduct as “unlawhat inducement of a mass exodus.” Brown & Brown’s complaint involves nearly eight times as many departing employees. The arithmetic is not favorable to Howden.
The Extraction That Became an Occupation
The operational theory behind the Christmas raid assumed that speed would neutralize legal exposure. Howden’s alleged strategy reflected the logic of Three Kings: execute the departures during holiday week, secure broker-of-record signatures before courts reopen, and present Brown & Brown with a fait accompli that injunctive relief could freeze but not reverse. The WhatsApp messages quoted in the complaint suggest awareness that the window would close quickly. Employees were allegedly instructed to work through the weekend, with promises of handsome rewards for those who secured client transfers before the inevitable legal response.
The theory might work in jurisdictions where employee mobility receives strong protection and damages models calculate harm over transitional periods. Massachusetts is not such a jurisdiction. The Chapter 93A framework transforms what Howden may have budgeted as litigation friction into potential liability that exceeds any plausible revenue from the acquired employees.
The exposure stacks in layers. Base compensatory damages in broker-of-record cases can extend across the duration of client relationships, which in certain insurance lines exhibit remarkable persistence. A client who would have remained with Brown & Brown for fifteen years absent the raid represents fifteen years of lost revenue, not a one-year transition cost. Apply that calculation across hundreds of transferred clients, double or triple the result under Chapter 93A, add mandatory attorneys’ fees, and the arithmetic produces numbers that make the raid look less like an acquisition strategy and more like a leveraged bet against the legal system.
The pattern across multiple plaintiffs suggests deliberate business model rather than isolated incident. Marsh filed suit in summer 2025 after 90 employees departed simultaneously; Howden absorbed the litigation and continued recruiting. Aon obtained a preliminary injunction on Christmas Eve, six days before the Brown & Brown raid; Howden proceeded anyway. Willis Towers Watson and Alliant have since filed parallel complaints. Each lawsuit represents friction, but a company treating damages as a cost of market entry might rationally absorb the friction rather than pursue slower organic growth.
The problem with this calculation is that it appears to have been made in London by executives who treated American jurisdictions as interchangeable. The Governo decision was four years old. The Cynosure verdict was national news. A company sophisticated enough to coordinate disappearing WhatsApp messages should have been sophisticated enough to research where the legal minefields were buried.
The Operator Who Walked Back to Base
The evidentiary detail available to Brown & Brown before formal discovery raises an obvious question: how did they know? The complaint quotes specific WhatsApp messages, identifies the disappearing message setting configured for 24-hour deletion, names the “Seal Team 6” moniker, and describes internal coordination with granularity that suggests direct access rather than reconstruction. The most plausible explanation is one that Three Kings would recognize: someone in the convoy decided the destination was not worth the journey and turned back.
A conspiracy requiring 200 participants to maintain operational security is a conspiracy that has already failed; the only question is when the failure becomes visible. Each additional co-conspirator represents an additional conscience that might activate, an additional risk calculation that might resolve differently than the organizers assumed. Somewhere in the WhatsApp threads, someone read the messages about working through the weekend and concluded that the personal liability exposure outweighed the promised rewards.
The turncoat’s gift, if one exists, provides Brown & Brown with more than evidence. It provides a roadmap to discovery: which communications to subpoena, which devices to image, which witnesses to depose first. The Aon complaint documents similar evidentiary windfalls, including records of irregular printing activity and personal email forwards of confidential documents. The operational security that the raiders believed they had established has proven porous.
The deeper irony concerns the nature of purchased loyalty. The employees who departed were allegedly offered financial inducements to breach their fiduciary duties and participate in what the complaint characterizes as a predatory scheme. Such inducements create transactions, not allegiances. A transaction can be renegotiated when circumstances shift, and circumstances have shifted considerably since December. The turncoat represents the first defection from a coalition held together by compensation rather than conviction. Additional defections may follow as individual defendants reassess their positions under oath.
The Weapon Howden Did Not Know Was There
The remedial innovation that may define this case is the “springing noncompete,” a judicial imposition of noncompete restrictions on employees who were not previously bound by such agreements. Massachusetts law authorizes this remedy under both the Noncompetition Agreement Act and the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, though no appellate court has yet sustained its application.
Traditional injunctive relief preserves the status quo, but when the status quo has already shifted through mass resignations and client transfers, preservation merely freezes the harm in place. A springing noncompete operates differently. It can remove key organizers from their competitive positions entirely, forcing them out of client-facing roles regardless of whether they had signed noncompete agreements with their former employer. Applied to alleged ringleaders like Eric Kasen, such relief would not merely prevent future solicitation; it would unwind the organizational structure that Howden built through the raid.
The inevitable disclosure doctrine provides a complementary theory. Massachusetts courts recognize that executives with access to trade secrets will inevitably rely on that knowledge in competitive roles, because such information integrates into professional judgment in ways that cannot be segregated. Applied to the alleged coordinators, inevitable disclosure could justify removing them from any role where their knowledge of Brown & Brown’s operations would confer competitive advantage.
These remedies remain untested at the appellate level. The Brown & Brown case, however, presents facts that may justify innovation: hundreds of participants, encrypted communications designed to evade discovery, timing calculated to exploit judicial unavailability, and a pattern of similar conduct across multiple jurisdictions. The question becomes whether equity possesses tools sufficient to address such conduct, or whether sophisticated raiders can exploit the gap between wrongful action and judicial response indefinitely.
What They Carried Out
The five lawsuits now pending against Howden describe a consistent pattern: synchronized departures, encrypted coordination, broker-of-record transfers executed under time pressure, and a defense narrative that strains credulity with each additional filing. The financial exposure compounds across jurisdictions but concentrates in Massachusetts, where the Chapter 93A framework transforms compensatory damages into something closer to punitive.
The final scene of Three Kings finds the soldiers fundamentally altered by an operation that was supposed to be simple. They entered the desert seeking gold and discovered that extraction entangles the extractor in consequences that cannot be escaped through speed or planning. The gold had weight; the context followed them home. Howden entered Massachusetts seeking client relationships and may discover that the acquisition entangles them in a legal framework they did not anticipate and cannot exit on favorable terms.
The broker-of-record letters that seemed so valuable in December look different in January, when they are exhibits in litigation rather than evidence of successful expansion. The employees who departed amid promises of handsome rewards now face depositions, personal liability, and career uncertainty. The operational security that disappearing messages were supposed to provide has evaporated, replaced by complaint allegations that quote those messages verbatim.
What Howden carried out of the Christmas raid remains unclear. What they carried into it, they may not recover.
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