Category Archives: Trade Secrets

            Last week, Judge Timothy S. Hillman of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts allowed a plaintiff’s motion for a preliminary injunction against three defendants who allegedly stole trade secrets from their former employer, even though there was no evidence that the defendants used that information when they went to a competing company.  Judge Hillman also [...]

            In a decision from March that has only recently garnered media attention, Judge Rya Zobel of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts concluded that a Georgia corporation whose agent allegedly stole trade-secret information from a company’s office in Waltham, Massachusetts could face a lawsuit in Massachusetts.  The plaintiff, BGI Inc., is a Massachusetts corporation that makes environmental [...]

Much attention has been focused in recent months on the threat to U.S. businesses posed by so-called “cyber-espionage”:  attacks on IT systems and thefts of confidential information from foreign governments and criminal/terrorist organizations.  Certainly, these threats are growing.  However, employers should not lose sight of the disheartening fact that the most significant threat to a [...]

During this past fall and much of the winter, I was serving as a Special Assistant District Attorney in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, which didn’t give me much time to blog. So, to steal a technique that John Marsh uses every week to supplement his excellent posts on the Trade Secret Litigator blog, here are some short discussions of [...]

Law360 reports on a panel event held by the Association of Corporate Counsel on Tuesday to discuss the perils of allowing employees to use their own mobile devices for work purposes.  Soren Burkhart of McGladrey LLP argued that ”Bring Your Own Device” policies, which I have written about here, here, and here, should be called “Bring Your Own Disaster” policies because of the risks involved in allowing employees [...]

Once a lawsuit over trade secrets or a noncompete begins, “discovery” is usually the next step in the case.  This is the phase of a lawsuit where each party asks for documents and conducts depositions to obtain relevant information from the other side.  As any employment litigator can tell you, discovery usually involves tricky issues regarding what information is relevant [...]

Margaret A. Keane has written an interesting article on the growing use of “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) policies by employers whose employees use mobile devices for work purposes.  These policies trade support for employee mobile devices from the employer’s IT organization for, among other things, regulation of “the use of mobile devices in ways that may implicate [...]

A good article in BNA by Eric W. Schweibenz and Lisa M. Mandrusiak argues that the recent trend in trade secret litigation has been to require plaintiffs to state with specificity early in litigation what trade secrets they claim the defendants stole.  This prevents “fishing expeditions,” where plaintiffs bring vague claims for misappropriation of trade secrets in the hope that they’ll find [...]

BNA has published a good article by David A. McManus, Prashanth Jayachandran, and Jason Burns on how an employer can protect its confidential information from being taken by a departing employee to a competitor.  The key is to have a plan.  Some of their more interesting points include: In addition to having certain employees sign non-disclosure agreements, an [...]

On Tuesday, July 24, the Boston Bar Association will be hosting a symposium on noncompete and trade secret legislation in Massachusetts.  State Representatives Brownsberger and Ehrlich, the leaders of the movement to substantially limit the enforceability of noncompetes in Massachusetts, will be in attendance.  Mike and I plan to be there, too, and will report back.  [...]

The Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly article from this week’s edition, which discusses Judge Casper’s decision in U.S. Electrical Services, Inc. v. Schmidt, is available here.  I’m quoted in the second section of the article.

Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly reports on a new decision from the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts by Judge Casper that makes “inevitable disclosure” arguments effective only in cases involving noncompetition agreements. I’m quoted in the text of the article.  (For those of you without a subscription to Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, I’ll post a copy [...]

Law360 has posted a useful article by Ben Quarmby about the dangers of employee use of social media to a company’s patents, trade secrets, and copyrights.  The big danger for trade secrets is disclosure.  Trade secrets must remain secret if they are to be protected by the law, and “[o]nce the secret has been disclosed on [...]

Sometimes a big problem for plaintiffs in trade-secret lawsuits is identifying precisely what was stolen.  In a recent case out of California, a plaintiff employer sued a former employee who was hired by a competitor for misappropriation of trade secrets.  The employee had backed up his company laptop on a hard drive, and he did not return [...]

Last month, I wrote about a trade-secret case in which a defendant employee, David Cheung, asked the court to order the plaintiff employer, Brocade Communications, to pay his attorney’s fees because the claims against him were frivolous.  Last Wednesday, the court agreed to dismiss the case because the only evidence Brocade had against Cheung was gleaned in settlement [...]

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a law firm that was sued by two former employees of the firm’s former client for filing a trade-secret lawsuit against them, allegedly without having any good-faith reason to do so. Last Monday, a former employee similarly asked the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in [...]

A number of cases involving former executives have received national attention recently and serve as a good reminder that trade-secret, non-solicitation, and non-competition controversies can arise at the highest level of a company. Another recent case also serves as a reminder that trade-secret claims should be filed only when there is a good-faith basis to do [...]

A recent survey of 2,625 adult Americans reveals some interesting attitudes towards employer confidential information, including different attitudes depending on a person’s age. Over two-thirds (68%) of 18-34 year olds responded that it is acceptable to remove confidential information from their place of employment. This contrasts with just half (50%) of those 55 or older believing such [...]

A former Intel computer hardware engineer recently agreed to plead guilty to five counts of wire fraud in Massachusetts federal court stemming from his theft of 13 secret documents from Intel’s facility in Hudson, Massachusetts while he was an employee there in June 2008. Biswamohan Pani became an employee of Intel in May 2003 and began [...]

An interesting case decided on April 3 in Florida confirms the axiom that information that is not secret cannot be a trade secret. In Godwin Pumps of America, Inc. v. Ramer, Godwin sued its former employee, Ramer, for, among other things, trade secret misappropriation under Florida’s Uniform Trade Secret Act (see here for more on the [...]

At my last Massachusetts Bar Association (MBA) Civil Litigation Section meeting, I learned about a bill to adopt the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA) that has been floating around the Massachusetts Legislature since late January. Forms of the UTSA have been adopted in 46 states in addition to the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the [...]

Below is a cross-post with the Security, Privacy and the Law blog. Employers increasingly are suing former employees who have left to join or form competing companies using the civil remedies available under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”), 18 U.S.C. § 1030. They use the CFAA to prevent their former employees from using sensitive [...]

This decision from the United States District Court in Boston, denying a request for a preliminary injunction to enforce non-competition and other restrictive covenants, is notable for a few reasons. First, the federal court in Massachusetts issues relatively few decisions involving requests to enforce noncompete and/or nonsolicitation agreements; a published decision from a federal judge — in [...]

Multiple media outlets (see here  and here, for example) have been covering an alarming report jointly issued recently by the Ponemon Institute, an Arizona-based research group, and Symantec Corp., that data theft is common among departing employees. As reported in the Washington Post, the most significant finding of a joint survey of employees who left a [...]

While some in the business community continue to focus on whether the ability to enforce noncompetes in Massachusetts places the state at a competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis Silicon Valley, a recent decision from the Massachusetts Superior Court’s Business Litigation Session – Network Systems Architects Corp. v. Dimitruk — highlights the difficulties departing employees and their future employers [...]

Your valuable sales employee abruptly departs and begins working at your direct competitor.  Soon, some of your customers follow the departed employee and other customers cancel meetings you have scheduled with them.  Now you are suspicious, so you scrutinize your former employee’s computer activity and discover that just prior to his departure, he emailed to [...]