Name the Secret or Lose: Double Eagle Alloys v. Hooper and the Particularity Trap

The Tenth Circuit affirmed summary judgment against a metals distributor that could not describe its trade secrets with enough particularity or show they were not readily ascertainable.

By Lidiia Levitska  ·  May 9, 2026
Stacks of polished steel and specialty alloy pipes in an industrial warehouse
Specifications a company posts on its own website are hard to reclaim as secrets after an employee leaves. Shutterstock
Educational content, not legal advice. This article explains general legal concepts. It does not create an attorney–client relationship. For your specific situation, consult a licensed attorney.

A departing salesman who copies 2,660 files to an external drive looks like a textbook trade-secret defendant. Yet in Double Eagle Alloys, Inc. v. Hooper, 134 F.4th 1078 (10th Cir. 2025), the Tenth Circuit affirmed summary judgment for the employee and his new employer. The company that lost the files could never say, with the precision the law demands, what its secrets actually were. The decision, authored by Circuit Judge Gregory A. Phillips for a panel that also included Judges Bacharach and Seymour, is a cautionary tale about the difference between data that walks out the door and data that the law will protect.

At a glance

  • Case: Double Eagle Alloys, Inc. v. Hooper, No. 24-5089 (10th Cir. Apr. 22, 2025), 134 F.4th 1078.
  • Court: U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; opinion by Judge Gregory A. Phillips, joined by Judges Bacharach and Seymour. On appeal from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma (Judge John D. Russell).
  • Posture: Appeal from summary judgment for the defendants on claims under the Defend Trade Secrets Act and the Oklahoma Uniform Trade Secrets Act, plus related theories.
  • Holding: Double Eagle failed to identify its claimed trade secrets with sufficient particularity, which at summary judgment means producing evidence that could satisfy the statutory definition. It offered no evidence that the pump-shaft-quality specifications, the pricing model, or the customer drawings were not readily ascertainable through proper means.
  • Significance: Reinforces that trade-secret plaintiffs must define their secrets precisely and prove genuine secrecy; copying files is not misappropriation if the files are not protectable secrets.

A decade of files, three categories of “secrets”

Double Eagle Alloys and Ace Alloys are competing distributors of specialty metals for the oil-and-gas industry. Michael Hooper spent a decade-long career at Double Eagle, closing it out with nearly five years as its Inside Sales Manager, before leaving to join Ace. On his way out he downloaded 2,660 digital files from his Double Eagle computer to an external storage device. Double Eagle sued under the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act and the Oklahoma Uniform Trade Secrets Act, alleging Hooper and Ace had misappropriated its trade secrets.

In the district court Double Eagle described its secrets as “PSQ specifications, pricing, margins, costs, and customer drawings.” On appeal it folded margins and costs into pricing, leaving three categories: pump-shaft-quality (PSQ) alloy specifications, pricing, and customer drawings. That framing proved fatal. As the panel explained, identifying a trade secret at summary judgment is not a separate labeling exercise: a plaintiff identifies its secret by producing evidence that could satisfy the statutory definition, and a failure to produce that evidence is a failure to identify. On this record, Double Eagle produced almost none.

The particularity requirement

The Tenth Circuit’s first and most important holding concerns identification. A trade-secret plaintiff must “describe the subject matter of the trade secret with sufficient particularity to separate it from matters of general knowledge in the trade.” That requirement is not a pleading technicality; it is what allows a court and a jury to test whether something secret was actually taken. Double Eagle largely gestured at broad buckets (its specifications, its pricing, its drawings) without isolating what, within those buckets, was uniquely its own rather than the common knowledge and skill of anyone in the specialty-metals trade.

The court was particularly unimpressed with the PSQ specifications. Double Eagle cited no evidence describing the significance of its specifications, the time and effort required to create them, the competitive advantage they conferred, or their uniqueness compared to other distributors. Worse, the undisputed record showed that the company had publicly posted certain aspects of its 718 PSQ specification, including a nearly identical chemical composition, on its own website. Its customers had near-identical specifications of their own, and Ace Alloys had developed its own 718 and K500 specifications almost a year before Hooper ever left. Information a company broadcasts to the world cannot simultaneously be a secret it guards, and a plaintiff cannot cure that defect by pointing vaguely at the category as a whole.

Secrecy must be real and ongoing

The pricing and customer-drawing categories failed for related reasons. The DTSA protects information only if its owner has “taken reasonable measures to keep such information secret” and the information derives “independent economic value, actual or potential, from not being generally known to, and not being readily ascertainable through proper means by,” someone who could profit from it. As the panel stressed, that second requirement is more exacting than merely showing the information was not publicly known.

On pricing, Double Eagle conceded it shares its prices with customers and does not stop them from passing those prices along, so the prices themselves were out. It fell back on its pricing model. The panel agreed that a pricing model can be a trade secret, and said so expressly, but held that pricing models are not per se trade secrets. Double Eagle’s evidence was a single sentence in a sales manager’s affidavit, a conclusory affidavit from its president, and uncontextualized spreadsheets. Nothing showed what set its model apart, what it cost to build, or what advantage it delivered.

The customer drawings failed on a different point that is easy to miss: the drawings came from the customers, not from Double Eagle. That alone doomed the DTSA claim, which only an owner of the trade secret may bring. Under the OUTSA, Double Eagle offered no evidence that the drawings were hard to obtain from the customers themselves, and it conceded that customers “can share the drawings with anyone they please.” A confidentiality agreement with one customer did not change that, and Ace Alloys in fact obtained that customer’s drawings from a third party.

The lesson the panel drove home is that secrecy is a practice, not a label. Calling a document “confidential,” or feeling that pricing is sensitive, does not make it a trade secret. Notably, the court rejected the suggestion that it had demanded absolute secrecy: the claims failed for want of evidence that the information was not readily ascertainable, not because anything less than total lockdown forfeits protection. Double Eagle’s general assertions of value and secrecy, untethered from particular information, could not raise a triable issue.

Open questions

  • How specific is specific enough? The opinion demands particularity but, like most such cases, does not fix a bright line; how granular a description a plaintiff must offer will continue to vary by trade and record.
  • When does limited external sharing destroy secrecy? Sharing with NDA-bound customers may preserve secrecy, while uncontrolled disclosure destroys it; the dividing line in mixed records remains fact-intensive.
  • Does file volume ever matter? The court treated the download of thousands of files as beside the point on protectability; whether sheer scale or aggregation can ever supply value or particularity was left for another day.

Implications

  • Identify before you litigate. Plaintiffs should be able to list, with specificity, exactly which documents or data points are secret and why, before filing. Do not improvise categories at summary judgment.
  • Do not publish your own secrets. Specifications posted on a public website are not recoverable as trade secrets; audit public-facing materials before claiming them.
  • Control external sharing, and check who owns what. Prices a customer is free to repeat are not secrets, and a document a customer hands you is generally the customer’s, not yours. The DTSA claim over the drawings failed on ownership alone.
  • Copying is not misappropriation. A departing employee taking thousands of files creates litigation risk, but liability still requires that the files contain protectable secrets.
  • Build the secrecy record early. Reasonable measures (marking, segregation, access limits) should exist before a dispute, because they are what summary judgment tests.

Frequently asked questions

Why did Double Eagle lose even though its former employee took thousands of files? Taking files is not the same as taking trade secrets. The Tenth Circuit held that Double Eagle never identified its claimed secrets with enough particularity and produced no evidence that they were not readily ascertainable through proper means. It had posted aspects of its specifications on its own website, it let customers repeat its prices, and the customer drawings came from the customers rather than from Double Eagle.

What does it mean to identify a trade secret with particularity? A plaintiff must describe the claimed secret specifically enough to distinguish it from general knowledge and skill in the trade. At summary judgment that means producing evidence that could satisfy the statutory definition. Pointing to broad categories like specifications, pricing, and customer drawings, without showing what is uniquely secret about them, is not enough.

What should employers do to protect specifications and pricing? Treat secrecy as an ongoing practice, not a label. Limit access, mark and segregate confidential material, avoid publishing specifications on public websites, use NDAs with customers and vendors, and be prepared to articulate exactly what is secret and why it has value.

Authorities and sources

Related guides

Lidiia Levitska
About the Author

Lidiia Levitska

International Intellectual Property Attorney

Lidiia Levitska focuses on intellectual property dispute resolution, policy, and advisory work across international institutions and government bodies. From 2021 to 2025 she served at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), managing arbitration cases and overseeing compliance with the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP), and earlier led IP policy research as a Senior Policy Officer at the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine. She holds an LL.M. in International Intellectual Property Law from Chicago-Kent College of Law and an M.A. in Information Technology Law from the University of Tartu, and was admitted to the Ukrainian Bar in 2019.

More about Lidiia →