Non-Compete and Trade Secrets News for the week ended December 15, 2017
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Ex Parte Seizures of Trade Secrets
The Defend Trade Secrets Act's provision for ex parte seizures of property has generated considerable buzz and commentary, much more so than the remedy's narrow application seems to be worth. I am interested in it only in the academic sense, not the pragmatic one.
If you want nuts and bolts as to how it works, look elsewhere. I'm not covering it here. (Though if you're truly jonesing for stuff, e-mail me and I'll send you a white paper on it.) The gist is simple: if a plaintiff feels a defendant has stolen trade secrets, it can petition the court for an order to retrieve the property containing those secrets.
The case law applying the ex parte seizure order is understandably thin, given how new the DTSA is. Still, there's more on this remedy than more conventional ones, simply because it takes longer to try a case to judgment than it does to pursue an emergency interim order. So we have some helpful cases.
The most interesting one so far is Blue Star Land Services, LLC v. Coleman, No. 17-931, a case pending in the Western District of Oklahoma. Of course, it involves an employee departure that appears to have gone completely haywire. And even less surprisingly given the venue, it involves the oil and gas industry.
I am showing at the bottom of this post the district court's original ex parte seizure order. This one is pretty interesting since it involves an application for electronic storage devices and a Dropbox account (really, credentials to get into that account). Misappropriation tools tend to be digital, presenting sticky issues for law-enforcement seizure efforts. Put another way, it's easier to seize a bag of dope than it is a cloud-based folder of PDFs.
The Order below is a bit broad, but perhaps necessarily so. That is, it orders the seizure of "[a]ny computers, computer hard drives, or memory devices in Defendants' possession that may contain [trade secret information]." It further extends to seizure of usernames and passwords, information even less apt to forcible retrieval but obviously related to the instrumentalities needed to facilitate the alleged theft. All in all, I think counsel did a good job proposing this quirky remedy, and the court did a nice job entering it given the difficult aspects of seizing digital assets.
North Dakota Non-Compete Decision
We now move upwards to North Dakota, awash in fracking material but mercifully bereft of non-compete litigation. Tell that, though, to one Dawn Osborne, an office supply house sales representative who signed a two-year non-compete with Brown & Saenger.
The problem for Osborne is that even though she worked in Fargo, her employer was a South Dakota company. And the non-compete agreement contained a South Dakota choice-of-law/choice-of-forum clause. But North Dakota prohibits non-compete agreements along the same lines that California does. The Supreme Court of North Dakota held the forum-selection clause invalid, stating "one may not contract for application of another state's law or forum if the natural result is to allow enforcement of a non-compete agreement in violation of North Dakota's long-standing and strong public policy against non-compete agreements." This shows the importance in non-enforcement states of establishing venue through a declaratory judgment action to challenge a forum-selection clause. Litigants in California and Georgia know this tactic well.
A link to Osborne v. Brown & Saenger, Inc. is available here.
My 9-Year (Blogging) Anniversary
I've been blogging about non-competes longer than I've been married.
If my wife is reading this, it feels like I just got married yesterday and I'm still in the throes of wedded bliss! I can't say the same about blogging, but it has been a fun journey to share my thoughts and ideas on here. When I originally started this, my goal was simply to provide helpful, informative content.
My style has changed a great deal from those first timid days when I wasn't sure what my voice would be. I suspect that's true for most people who provide commentary in this format. I was interested, after 9 years, to see which posts (out of more than 600) were read the most, figuring that there would be some sort of logical pattern.
Nope. Some of the most widely-read posts were fairly predictable, like my attack on one of the worst, if not the worst, non-compete I've seen. Then there were my twin posts (here and here) on Tradesman Int'l v. Black, which discussed an important Seventh Circuit case I litigated on bad faith in trade secrets cases. Among the more popular posts was a discussion on pursuing declaratory judgment actions (much like Ms. Osborne did in North Dakota) and ensuring you have a sufficiently ripe controversy. I get tons of e-mails, messages, and calls on that from other attorneys and potential clients.
By far my most popular post, though, was an assessment of what exactly a "solicitation" is in the context of restrictive covenant litigation. I figured it would be a good one, but the numbers were staggering. But even some really obscure, pedantic posts generated an abnormal number of hits, such as about using contention interrogatories. Or this one involving the mootness rule on appeal. Or for God's sakes this one, with the almost intoxicating title "Some Thoughts on Pursuing Expedited Discovery." Turns out, y'all are civil procedure nerds.
The future of legal blogging is a bit uncertain. In this particular area, it's easy to get drowned out by blogs that are manufactured and designed to attract viewers. Many are unhelpful, uninteresting, and apparently undertaken solely as part of a poorly conceived executive committee marketing endeavor. Still, there are many excellent sources of information online which add context and color to the discussion.
I don't where this, my blog, ends, but I know it does end. And I will know when the time is right. So God willing, it may have started before my marriage, but it won't outlast it. For now, thanks for reading.
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