Today's headlines provided an interesting twist on the intersection between trade secret law and sunshine (or "freedom of information") laws. See UConn Fights to Keep Donor List Secret. Typically,...
As we all know, trade secret litigation has been steadily on the rise for the past decade. (See The Who, What, Where, When, How, and Why of Trade Secret Audits and, in the related area of noncompete...
For those of you interested in seeing a copy of the Massachusetts noncompete bill as it was filed, click here or on the image to the right. Remember that the goal of the Representatives sponsoring...
The bill in Massachusetts to codify, clarify, and modernize Massachusetts law relative to employee noncompetition agreements was re-filed today, with several significant changes from the prior version...
We spend lots of time on this blog discussing trade secret protection. To give some context, I thought it might be helpful to have a few statistics: Trade secret and related noncompete cases have m...
Pfizer reportedly sold $11.4 billion – yes, billion with a “b” – of cholesterol-lowing drug, Lipitor, last year and is reportedly on track to sell another $13 billion this year. See here....
For those interested in the status of and plans for the Massachusetts noncompete bill or Massachusetts noncompete law more generally, there are two up-coming discussions you may wish to attend. The...
This week’s disclosures by Wikileaks of hundreds of thousands of classified, secret documents is a stark reminder of the admonitions that we trade secrets lawyers have been saying for years: It is...
A lot has been written on how insecure social media can be and the need to assess the risks. I won't bother to add more. I am, however, passing along a very-well written (and lengthy) discussion of...
The 50 state survey of noncompete laws has been updated, primarily to reflect the change in Georgia law. It is available for download here. Please note that the chart will be periodically updated...
There is a latin maxim, "Gladiator in arena consilium capit." Translation: “The gladiator is formulating his plan in the arena." (I thank my boys, the latin scholars, for introducing me to the maxim...
When an employee is bound by a noncompetition agreement, it is rare for the noncompete to be the exclusive restriction on the employee's post-employment conduct. Rather, noncompetition agreements are...
Many years ago (1997, I think), I wrote an article about email privacy in the workplace. Given the recent debate following City of Ontario v. Quon (see my prior post, So, Can Your Employees Sext At Wo...
The perennial issue of the extent of privacy rights in the workplace -- in particular, what right the employer has to review private messages (including sexually-explict text messages, see "sexting")...
The utility of a 50 state survey on noncompetes has come up at various points. So, I finally took it upon myself to create one and make it publicly available. The chart is a summary of employee noncom...
Well, I guess it's not such a bad thing that my last post was about the HP/Oracle/Hurd dispute, as there's more to report. It's settled. No surprise there; most of these cases do settle - and settl...
Bad pun aside, Hewlett-Packard has sued its former CEO, Mark Hurd, who left HP last month and reportedly just joined Oracle as its new co-president. (A copy of the complaint if available here.) No...
There is an endless variety of types of trade secrets and confidential information. (On the question of the significance of the distinction, see Trade Secret or Confidential Information?, posted on J...
For those interested in the current status on the pending legislation to reform noncompete law in Massachusetts, the Boston Bar Association will be hosting a symposium on noncompete reform. The paneli...
eBay has reportedly been sued by EPRT Ventures for $3.8 million. The claim appears to be not only that eBay supposedly infringes on certain patents, but that eBay misappropriated trade secrets disclos...
Each time a new technology rolls out, legal decisions follow. Social media is the latest. Remember the cyberstalker? How about Facebook's lawsuit against Power.com? Or the class action against Face...
Lawsuits over trade secrets typically involve things like customer lists, formulas, manufacturing processes, etc. Can the location of houses for use as movie sets be a trade secret? Yep. Well, at leas...
Exactly one year ago, I wrote a post entitled "An Ounce of Prevention... " for my prior law firm's Trade Secret / Noncompete Blog (which I had created only days earlier). In the post, I recommended...
You followed the rules. You did as you were told. You didn’t take any documents from your former employer when you left your job. Excellent! But, what about your former employer’s trade secre...