Misappropriation, the architecture of trade-secret damages, and the causation problems that decide nine- and ten-figure verdicts.
Liability stood, but the largest damages award in Virginia history collapsed over a single jury instruction. The case is a masterclass in trade-secret causation — and a warning that revenue is not damages.
The Fourth Circuit affirms dismissal of a DTSA complaint that defined its trade secrets three ways, holding that sweeping definitions fail the particularity that the statute's secrecy and value elements presuppose.
The Second Circuit affirmed dismissal of a software trade-secret claim because the owner delegated access control to a licensee and never required anyone downstream to keep the secret.
How a Massachusetts jury found a competing insulin-patch maker liable for misappropriating Omnipod design secrets — and why the court then cut the award by nearly 90 percent.
The Ninth Circuit endorses a continued-use theory under the Defend Trade Secrets Act, then holds that Google's published patent applications extinguished the very secret the plaintiff needed.
Predicting Ohio law, the Sixth Circuit held that the Uniform Trade Secrets Act does not displace a plain breach-of-contract claim — a reading that restores the statute's savings clause and its promise of uniformity.
The SEC's largest stand-alone Rule 21F-17(a) settlement turned a routine settlement-release clause into an enforcement event, showing that NDAs are now read for what they silence, not just what they protect.
The Sixth Circuit affirmed a multimillion-dollar trade-secret verdict against a competitor that hired away a director of research and acquired, with him, a decade of curated broccoli-extract know-how.
A Texas federal court set aside the FTC's nationwide non-compete ban for lack of rulemaking authority — and the agency ultimately let the vacatur stand, leaving trade-secret law as employers' primary backstop.
A departing executive who never took a document could still be enjoined — the Seventh Circuit's 1995 ruling let an employer prove misappropriation by showing disclosure was inevitable, and the country has been divided over it ever since.
An early decision construing the Defend Trade Secrets Act's ex parte civil seizure remedy denies the order as unnecessary, modeling the preservation-and-TRO path most courts now follow.
A Coca-Cola chemist's theft of $120 million in BPA-free coating formulas produced one of the rare convictions under the Economic Espionage Act's foreign-government provision — and a Sixth Circuit opinion clarifying what the government must prove.
A half-century after the Supreme Court blessed trade secrets, Kewanee Oil v. Bicron remains the clearest map of when to file and when to keep quiet.
A Washington federal court holds that the Defend Trade Secrets Act reaches a foreign defendant whenever an act in furtherance occurs in the United States — even an act the defendant did not commit.
A Northern District of New York court denied a trade-secret injunction where a former employee's new employer plausibly reverse-engineered publicly available parts—and the plaintiff could not prove its specifications were secret or improperly taken.
When Stiffel's lamp patents were held invalid, the Supreme Court ruled that no state unfair-competition law could stop Sears from copying the unpatented design — establishing that exclusivity flows only from the federal patent bargain.
The Tenth Circuit, in an opinion by then-Judge Gorsuch, upheld a $2.92 million reasonable-royalty award for stolen source code — confirming that a misappropriator can owe royalty damages for mere disclosure, with no proof of commercial use.
A California consultant who sold DuPont's chloride-route titanium-dioxide process to Chinese state firms became the first defendant convicted by a jury under the economic-espionage section of the EEA, and the Ninth Circuit affirmed.
Judge Posner explained why a container design disclosed in a bid — conceded not to be a trade secret and outside the parties' logistics-only nondisclosure agreement — was free for the recipient to use.
A federal court let an IBM executive walk straight to Hewlett-Packard, holding that a doctrine New York entertains in theory fails without particularized secrets, near-identical roles, and proof of bad faith.
The Second Circuit erased a roughly $285 million unjust-enrichment award, holding that avoided development costs cannot be stacked on top of lost profits without proof of harm beyond actual loss.
A Utah court granted a DTSA ex parte seizure where the defendants had supplied false information, hidden and moved files, and possessed the technical skill to defeat an ordinary injunction—a rare case clearing the statute's high bar.
New York's high court refused to void an overbroad non-compete outright, instead narrowing it to the clients the employee personally served and articulating the state's modern reasonableness test.
A federal court kept a trade-secret suit against a Chinese competitor in Illinois, holding China an inadequate forum and wielding the DTSA's extraterritorial reach and a worldwide TRO.
An Eastern District of Virginia bench trial inventoried what reasonable measures look like in practice, then found misappropriation in only two of eighteen alleged disclosures.
The Third Circuit confirmed an arbitration award against a two-decade Sabre employee who launched a rival Chinese company while still on the payroll, including more than a million dollars in head-start damages.
A California appellate court voided an employer's sweeping confidentiality provisions as a de facto noncompete that barred a trader from his profession for life.
The Fourth District reversed summary judgment to hold that California's trade-secret statute does not displace breach-of-contract, fiduciary-duty, conversion, and unfair-competition claims that rest on conduct independent of any misappropriation.
A California appellate panel voided an employee non-solicitation covenant under section 16600 and openly questioned the survival of Loral v. Moyes after Edwards.
The Eighth Circuit held that proprietary markings and confidentiality agreements were enough to keep aircraft-overhaul documents secret, even though much of their content was publicly available.
The fight over the recipe for Thomas' English Muffins produced a Third Circuit ruling that an employer need not prove disclosure is inevitable — only that the threat of misappropriation is sufficiently substantial.
A unanimous Supreme Court struck down Florida's anti-plug-molding statute, holding that a state may not grant patent-like protection to an unpatented design already disclosed to the public — and explaining why trade-secret law survives the same test.
A California federal court refused to hold as a matter of law that a departing sales manager's LinkedIn contacts and exported customer database were not trade secrets, sending the question to a jury.
Judge Easterbrook held that a software company's forty-three-page, undifferentiated description of its medical-billing system failed to identify any trade secret with the specificity the law demands.
An Indiana court held that a Rule 65 temporary restraining order can authorize the seizure of a defendant's laptop to preserve trade-secret evidence, sidestepping the DTSA's stringent ex parte seizure provision entirely.
The ITC barred a Chinese chemical maker's imports for trade-secret theft committed in China, and the Federal Circuit and Supreme Court let the exclusion order stand despite a contrary result in Chinese courts.
The Seventh Circuit held that a would-be buyer who received a target's secret designs during acquisition negotiations and then built a competing product had breached a confidential relationship the law implied from the dealings themselves.
A former Motorola engineer caught at O'Hare with stolen telecom secrets was convicted of trade-secret theft but acquitted of economic espionage, illustrating how hard it is to prove intent to benefit a foreign government.
The Third Circuit vacated a baking-supply injunction because the district court never said precisely what the protected trade secrets were — a cautionary tale about identifying the secret before enjoining anyone.
The Federal Circuit dismantled a $48.8 million trade-secret disgorgement award on three fronts at once — who decides it, how to apportion among secrets, and how long the unjust-enrichment clock runs once reverse engineering becomes possible.
The Sixth District extended California's trade-secret displacement doctrine to claims over non-trade-secret data while holding that an end user who runs compiled software does not thereby 'use' the source-code secrets behind it.
The Ninth Circuit held that a sunset clause unambiguously ended an NDA's confidentiality obligations after two years, vacating a verdict built on later conduct.
The Supreme Court held that federal patent law does not bar a state-law contract requiring perpetual royalties on a keyholder design whose patent application was rejected — a foundational endorsement of the license-instead-of-patent strategy.
The Ninth Circuit held that a buffet chain's everyday recipes and loosely guarded training manuals failed both elements of the secrecy analysis, marking the outer boundary of what 'qualifies' under the Uniform Trade Secrets Act.
A 1970 Fifth Circuit decision held that aerial photography of a plant under construction was an improper means of acquiring a trade secret, even though the photographers broke no law and breached no confidence.
California's first published decision squarely addressing trade-secret supersession held that the Uniform Trade Secrets Act displaces common-law tort claims resting on the same factual nucleus as the misappropriation theory.
The Seventh Circuit reversed summary judgment to hold that whether a trade-secret owner took 'reasonable' precautions is almost always a jury question turning on the balance of costs and benefits.
The Federal Circuit held that the International Trade Commission may bar imports based on trade-secret misappropriation occurring entirely in China, opening the ITC as a forum for cross-border theft.
The largest trade-secret award of its era recovered DuPont's actual loss for the theft of Kevlar know-how — then collapsed because the jury never heard the evidence that might have shown the secrets were not secret at all.
The earliest civil seizure order under the Defend Trade Secrets Act issued only after a temporary restraining order failed, modeling seizure as the remedy of last resort rather than first resort.
The Second Circuit reversed a Goldman Sachs programmer's criminal conviction because the company's high-frequency trading code was not a product 'produced for or placed in' commerce, exposing a gap Congress closed within months.
A District of Massachusetts judge enjoined three engineers who walked to Nvidia after copying tens of thousands of AMD files, holding that improper acquisition — not proven use — supports a trade-secret injunction.
A New York federal court refused to enjoin a departing internet executive and warned that inevitable disclosure should be invoked only in the rarest of cases — building the doctrine's most influential set of brakes.
The California Supreme Court held that Business and Professions Code section 16600 voids employee non-competes even when narrowly drawn, rejecting the Ninth Circuit's narrow-restraint gloss.
After four dismissals, the Third Circuit revived a microsphere drug-development trade-secret suit and gave the broadest appellate definition yet of what it means to 'use' a trade secret.
The Federal Circuit held that a disclosing party who ignored its NDA's written-designation protocol lost trade-secret protection at the moment of disclosure.
