Trade Secrets & Employee Mobility

Epstein Becker Green is proud to sponsor the American Intellectual Property Law Association’s (AIPLA) 2022 Trade Secret Summit in Miami, FL on December 8-9, 2022. The AIPLA Trade Secret Summit is the leading trade secret conference in the nation, with speakers from across the spectrum of private practitioners, in-house counsel, government, and academia, as well as fantastic networking opportunities.

Erik Weibust, Member of the Firm, is the outgoing-Chair of the AIPLA Trade Secret Committee and will speak on a panel entitled “Protecting AI-generated Inventions as Trade ...

A California Superior Court Judge in Orange County granted an attorneys’ fees award in the amount of $5.8 million to defendant Landmark Event Staffing Services, Inc. (“Landmark”) in Contemporary Services Corporation v. Landmark Event Staffing Services, Inc., Case No. 30-2009-00123939. This ruling reinforces the importance of carefully calibrating litigation strategy in trade secrets misappropriation cases to focus on vindicating legally protectable interests. Trade secrets litigation should not be used merely as an aggressive tactic to stifle a competitor.

In a pending trial in federal court in Boston in the case U.S. v. Haoyang Yu, et al., prosecutors accuse a design engineer and naturalized citizen from China of stealing microchips (monolithic microwave integrated circuits or “MMICs” used in radio, cellular and satellite communications) from his former employer Analog Devices, Inc. As reported in Law360, during opening statements last week, a federal prosecutor told the jury, “It’s a story of fraud. It’s a story of possession of stolen trade secrets. It’s a story of illegal exports and immigration fraud.” In support ...

On March 16, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed defendant Shan Shi’s conviction for conspiracy to commit theft of trade secrets. Given recent efforts at the state and now federal level to ban non-competes, employers may be more likely to consider partnering with law enforcement to remedy trade secret theft.

The Court’s opinion begins with the statement, “We can’t always get what we want, but, sometimes, we get what we need.” Unfortunately, the Court’s opinion continues, what Shi’s company needed were seven documents containing a ...