Trade Secrets
Misappropriation, the architecture of trade-secret damages, and the causation problems that decide nine- and ten-figure verdicts.
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Appian v. Pegasystems: How a $2 Billion Trade-Secret Verdict Came Undone
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.
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When 'Everything Is a Trade Secret' Is Nothing: Sysco Machinery v. DCS USA
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.
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Turret Labs v. CargoSprint: When Locking the Windows Isn't Enough
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.
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Insulet v. EOFlow: A $452 Million Verdict, an Avoided-Cost Theory, and the Limits of Trade-Secret Recovery
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.
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Attia v. Google: The DTSA Reaches Pre-Enactment Secrets, But Only If They Survive
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.
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Metron Nutraceuticals v. Cook: The Contract Carve-Out That Survives UTSA Displacement
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.
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When a Confidentiality Clause Becomes a Federal Violation: The SEC's $18 Million J.P. Morgan Whistleblower Order
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.
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Caudill Seed v. Jarrow Formulas: When a Researcher Carries the Library Out the Door
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.
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When the National Non-Compete Ban Fell: Ryan, LLC v. FTC and the Return to Trade-Secret Protection
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.
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PepsiCo v. Redmond: The Case That Built the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine
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.
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Brunswick Rail v. Sultanov: Why Courts Keep Saying No to DTSA Seizure
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.
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United States v. Xiaorong You: A 168-Month Sentence and the Anatomy of Economic Espionage
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.
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Secrecy or Monopoly: What Kewanee Oil v. Bicron Still Teaches About the Patent–Trade-Secret Choice
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.
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vPersonalize v. Magnetize: How a U.S. Court Reached a U.K. Defendant Under the DTSA
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.
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Kadant v. Seeley: Reverse Engineering as a Complete Answer
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.
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Sears v. Stiffel: The Pole Lamp That Made Copying a Federal Right
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.
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StorageCraft v. Kirby: A Reasonable Royalty Even When the Thief Never Profited
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.
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United States v. Liew: The First Jury Conviction for Economic Espionage
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.
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ConFold v. Polaris: When a Design Is Neither a Trade Secret Nor Covered by the NDA
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.
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IBM v. Visentin: When New York Recognized Inevitable Disclosure and Still Said No
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.
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Syntel v. TriZetto: The Limits of 'Avoided Costs' as DTSA Damages
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.
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Axis Steel Detailing v. Prilex: When 'Extraordinary Circumstances' Are Actually Met
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.
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BDO Seidman v. Hirshberg: New York's Blueprint for Partially Enforcing an Overbroad Covenant
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.
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Inventus Power v. Shenzhen Ace: The DTSA Follows Trade Secrets to China
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.
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MicroStrategy v. Business Objects: A Field Manual for Reasonable Secrecy Measures
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.
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Sabre GLBL v. Shan: Building a Competitor on the Clock, and Paying for the Head Start
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.
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Brown v. TGS Management: When a Confidentiality Clause Becomes an Illegal Noncompete
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.
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When the Secret Isn't the Wrong: Angelica Textile Services v. Park and the Limits of CUTSA Displacement
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.
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AMN Healthcare v. Aya Healthcare: California's Ban Reaches the Employee Non-Solicit
A California appellate panel voided an employee non-solicitation covenant under section 16600 and openly questioned the survival of Loral v. Moyes after Edwards.
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AvidAir v. Rolls-Royce: Legends, NDAs, and the Modest Bar for Reasonable Secrecy
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.
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Bimbo Bakeries v. Botticella: How the Third Circuit Enjoined an Executive Without Demanding Inevitability
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.
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Bonito Boats v. Thunder Craft: When a State Cannot Re-Create the Patent Monopoly
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.
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Cellular Accessories v. Trinitas: Are a Salesman's LinkedIn Connections His, or the Company's?
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.
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IDX v. Epic: A Trade Secret You Cannot Describe Is a Trade Secret You Cannot Protect
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.
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Magnesita Refractories v. Mishra: Seizing a Laptop Without the DTSA Seizure Statute
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.
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Sino Legend v. ITC: A 10-Year Import Ban and the Limits of Comity
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.
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Smith v. Dravo: When Sale Talks Create a Duty of Confidence
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.
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United States v. Hanjuan Jin: The Proof Gap Between Theft and Espionage
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.
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Mallet v. Lacayo: Why a Trade-Secret Injunction Collapsed for Lack of Specificity
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.
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TAOS v. Renesas: Disgorgement, Apportionment, and the Head-Start Clock
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.
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Object Code, Source Code, and the Outer Edge of Supersession: Silvaco v. Intel
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.
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BladeRoom v. Emerson: The Two-Year NDA That Ate a $60 Million Verdict
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.
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Aronson v. Quick Point Pencil: Collecting Royalties on a Patent That Never Issued
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.
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Buffets v. Klinke: Why a Recipe for Macaroni and Cheese Is Not a Trade Secret
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.
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Du Pont v. Christopher: Spying From the Sky as 'Improper Means'
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.
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The 'Same Nucleus of Facts': K.C. Multimedia v. Bank of America and the Birth of CUTSA Supersession
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.
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Rockwell v. DEV Industries: Posner Makes Secrecy a Cost-Benefit Problem
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.
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TianRui v. ITC: How Section 337 Reached a Theft That Happened in China
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.
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DuPont v. Kolon: A $919.9 Million Kevlar Verdict and the Fragile Foundations of Trade-Secret Damages
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.
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Mission Capital Advisors v. Romaka: The First DTSA Seizure, and Why It Took a TRO to Fail First
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.
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United States v. Aleynikov: When Stolen Source Code Fell Outside the EEA
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.
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AMD v. Feldstein: A Million Copied Files and the Limits of an Innocent Explanation
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.
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EarthWeb v. Schlack: The Decision That Tried to Cage Inevitable Disclosure
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.
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Edwards v. Arthur Andersen: California Closes the Door on the 'Narrow-Restraint' Exception
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.
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Oakwood Laboratories v. Thanoo: What It Takes to Plead 'Use' Under the DTSA
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.
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Convolve v. Compaq: When the NDA's Own Marking Rules Defeat the 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.