Blog : Trade Secret Litigation

Check out this updated version of our popular “Trade Secrets 101” memo.

It’s Franken-steen First let’s get something out of the way. The Texas Citizens Participation Act (TCPA) is a Frankenstein’s monster that the legislature created and now needs to reign in (not that they listen to me). As I explained in a three-part series back in the summer of 2017, the TCPA grants defendants in certain cases the unusual right to require the plaintiff to prove its case before taking any discovery. In litigator jargon, it effectively lets the defendant file a “no-evidence” motion for summary judgment without first requiring an adequate time for discovery. The statute was intended to curtail […]

If every customer list was a trade secret, that would impose a de facto non-compete on every sales person. But not every customer list is a trade secret.

If Apple sues Xpeng Motors for misappropriation of trade secrets, the opening statements may look like this . . .

Price undercutting is a common theory in trade secrets litigation. But are prices really trade secrets? Find out the legal standard and some common factual scenarios.

The sad saga of the Flaubert orphans and their attempts to require identification of trade secrets in litigation

What if I told you that to understand an employee’s confidentiality duties, you need to understand there are three kinds of confidential information covered by at least four different areas of law? You see, employers have three kinds of confidential information: Trade secrets Confidential information that is not a trade secret “Confidential” information that is not actually confidential A trade secret is confidential information that has “independent economic value” and is “not readily ascertainable” by competitors. Secret technology, secret business plans, the literal secret sauce—these are obvious trade secrets. Less obvious things like customer lists and company prices can be […]

The Greek yogurt wars provide a case study in the components of a typical trade secrets lawsuit.

On February 5, 2018, the day after the real Super Bowl, the Super Bowl of trade secrets trials started in federal court in San Francisco. You might have heard of some of the parties. The defendant was Uber. You may not have heard of the plaintiff, Waymo, but you probably know Waymo’s owner, a little company called Google. The issue in a nutshell: did Google engineer Anthony Levandowski steal Google’s confidential self-driving car technology—they call it “LiDAR”—and take it to Uber? This is the type of “departing employee” case I like to handle (on a slightly smaller scale), so it […]

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