When a Tech Giant Goes To Court

HP and successor HPE have spent almost a decade trying to recoup $5 billion from entrepreneur Mike Lynch over a bad takeover

- Jonathan Browning

Back when everyone still said “big data” instead of “machine learning,” the U.K.’s Autonomy Corp. considered itself an early leader in sorting and analyzing huge troves of information about online behavior, from video views to Facebook likes. Hewlett-Packard Co. thought so too and, in 2011, wrote a $10.3 billion check to buy it.

That was validation not only for Britain’s “Silicon Fen” but also for Mike Lynch, the University of Cambridge graduate with a Ph.D. in mathematical computing who founded Autonomy in 1996. After building it into the country’s second-biggest software company, he personally made $815 million from Autonomy’s sale. The adulation quickly turned to scandal, however, for both HP and Lynch.

In 2012, HP wrote down the vast majority of the deal and alleged that Lynch had orchestrated a massive accounting fraud to dress Autonomy up for a sale. The company says it wants $5 billion in damages from Lynch and Sushovan Hussain, Autonomy’s finance director. But the nine-month, £40 million ($51 million) U.K. civil trial—among the longest and most expensive in modern British history—has painted an unflattering picture of the American corporation, full of infighting and internal skulduggery, documented in dueling emails and testimony from top HP executives. When HP split in two in 2015, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE), the half that kept the AI division under former Chief Executive Officer and EBay Inc. legend Meg Whitman, continued the legal fight against Lynch.