Boston-based specialty insurance broker Risk Strategies Co. is suing two former employees and their new employer for allegedly stealing customers and poaching employees in a scheme the firm says has thus far cost it nearly $900,000 in revenue.
On March 20, 2026, more than six years after Risk Strategies acquired their family-owned Connecticut employee benefits agency and hired them, Tim and Sheena Tracy left Risk Strategies to join the Poughkeepsie, New York insurance agency Marshall + Sterling Enterprises. Risk Strategies claims that when they left, the Tracys, in concert with their new employer, poached two key employees and solicited customers using Risk Strategies’ trade secrets and confidential information.
The suit maintains their actions violate agreements that the Tracys renewed in June 2025 that prohibit them from soliciting clients for two years after leaving Risk Strategies and block them from hiring away any Risk Strategies employee for one year after departing.
Risk Strategies Acquires Connecticut’s Gerard B. Tracy Associates
Risk Strategies is suing the Tracys and Marshall + Sterling for alleged breach of the confidentiality and non-solicitation agreements and for alleged unfair competition and unjust enrichment. The Boston-based firm claims it has lost more than 15 accounts representing nearly $900,000 in revenue as of April 2, the date of its lawsuit filed in federal district court for Connecticut.
A spokesperson for Marshall + Sterling told Insurance Journal that the firm does not comment on pending litigation.
The complaint alleges that on the same day that the Tracys resigned from Risk Strategies, two other employees who worked directly with them — Meghann Dockum and Nina Garland— both submitted their notices of resignation and joined the Tracys at Marshall + Sterling. Risk Strategies claims that within days of the resignations, it began receiving reports that the former employees were actively soliciting Risk Strategies’ customers to follow them to Marshall + Sterling.
The Tracys’ solicitations have targeted customers with whom they worked while at Risk Strategies or about whom they obtained confidential information “in direct violation of their contractual and other legal obligations,” the complaint alleges.
In addition, the Tracys “simultaneously solicited-away” key support staff in an “unlawful raid” on Risk Strategies’ human capital that has “substantially handicapped Risk Strategies’ ability to retain customers” and that allowed them to “more expeditiously steal away Risk Strategies’ customers,” according to the lawsuit.
Risk Strategies claims the alleged unlawful conduct has caused and will continue to cause “irreparable harm” in the form of “loss of long-standing customer relationships, the erosion of goodwill, the diminishment of its competitive advantage in the marketplace, and the disruption of its workforce.”
The firm claims that the full extent of the harm “cannot be adequately measured in money damages alone, as it involves the disruption of customer trust, the impairment of Risk Strategies’ reputation, and the risk of disclosure and misuse of its trade secret business information.”
Risk Strategies is asking for damages as well as injunctive relief to halt the solicitation of its business by the defendants.
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