Contract law recognizes that the concepts of good faith and fair dealing are an unspoken aspect of every contract.  Yet, I tell clients that the best drafted contract in the world will not prevent bad actors from breaching the contract.  Dishonest conduct by the receiving party of proprietary information under the terms of an NDA can have particularly devastating effects for the NDA’s disclosing Read More

Unlike a patent, registered copyright, or registered trademark, all of which are the result of a formal grant by a government agency such as the United States Patent & Trademark Office, a trade secret has no such formal governmental recognition. Instead, the trade secret owner must take proactive steps to both establish and protect its trade secrets. To prevail in a trademark misappropriation lawsuit, the trade Read More

Background & Current Issues: Trade secrets have historically been an outlier in the area of intellectual property (IP) law because they have not been viewed as “real” IP. Today they are being increasingly viewed as valuable IP assets. Indeed Gene Quinn, one of the most influential IP thought leaders in the U.S., has predicted that trade secrets may pass patents in terms of valuation. Nevertheless, trade secrets Read More

The Eleventh Circuit’s reasoning in the case this blog summarizes is encouraging for any tech company that licenses access to its proprietary information or makes some part of it publicly available.  The decision holds that under Florida’s Uniform Trade Secret Law, these partial exposures of trade secrets to the public may not be fatal to a claim for trade secret misappropriation.  There is no question that the law Read More

On Dec. 16, 2020 in Attia, et al.  v. Google, LLC, et al.,  the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that a misappropriation claim under the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016, §18 U.S.C. 1836, et seq. (“DTSA”) may be brought for misappropriation that started prior to the DTSA’s enactment as long as the claim also arises from post-enactment misappropriation or from the continued use of the same trade secret. The DTSA Read More

In Dec. 2020 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the publication of a trade secret in a patent application extinguishes trade secret status.  Attia Architect PC, et al.  v. Google LLC, et al.   Architect Attia developed a system and method for automated design, fabrication, and construction called Engineered Architecture (EA).    In 2010 Attia entered into a partnership with Google wherein he Read More