Joseph Swanson Assesses Delta-CrowdStrike Dispute

Foley & Lardner LLP partner Joseph Swanson commented on the legal fight between Delta Airlines and CrowdStrike in the TechTarget article, “What the Delta-Crowdstrike lawsuit may mean for IT contracts.“

“Those kinds of buzzwords that are probably in the contract would allow Delta, if they were successful, to get out from under whatever that single-digit million cap is,” said Swanson, referencing an ongoing exchange between the companies in which Delta claims CrowdStrike’s conduct overrides the liability limit of the airline’s contract with the cybersecurity company, and CrowdStrike denies it was “grossly negligent” or committed “willful misconduct” in releasing the software update that caused the global outage at the center of the dispute.

Swanson said CrowdStrike’s claim that Delta failed to modernize its IT infrastructure could be in preparation for a defense based on the concept of contributory negligence, adding that in response, Delta will likely argue it has spent billions of dollars on IT and that no company can get everything right.