After a weeklong June trial, a Texas federal jury awarded Six Dimensions, Inc. (“Six Dimensions”), a digital marketing firm, $287,000 for its breach-of-contract claim against its former employee but rejected its behemoth $50 million claim for trade secret misappropriation against its competitor, Perficient Inc. (“Perficient”). READ MORE
Tillman v Egon Zehnder Ltd., the first employment competition case to reach the UK’s highest court in over a century was decided on July 3, 2019, changing the landscape for noncompetition agreements in the UK.
Oregon recently enacted HB2992, further limiting its already restrictive non-compete law, which will apply to any agreements entered on or after January 1, 2020. The new law amends Oregon’s prior non-compete law by requiring the employer, as a condition of the non-compete’ s enforceability, to provide a signed, written copy of the terms of the non-compete agreement to the employee within thirty days of the termination of employment. This is effectively a mandatory reminder, as Oregon’s non-compete law already required the employer to inform the employee at the outset of employment of the non-compete agreement, either two weeks prior to the employee’s first day of employment or as part of a bona fide advancement of the employee. Oregon’s non-compete law also already required that the employee be in an “administrative, executive, or professional” position and have access to trade secrets, other competitively sensitive information, or be “on-air” talent subject to other restrictions.
Oregon’s state legislature thus created a new hoop for employers to jump through before it can subject a limited subset of employees to non-competes. Oregon’s mandatory reminder at the end of an employee’s employment, and not just at the beginning, further aligns its non-compete law with one of the Obama administration’s final mandates for state legislators to improve the transparency and fairness of non-competes.
The stakes couldn’t be higher in the race amongst Silicon Valley self-driving companies vying to be the first to bring the industry-changing technology to market. With competition so steep, and the potential value counted in the trillions, the efforts to protect this technology have given rise to frequent trade secrets theft disputes.
In the most recent instance of alleged autonomous vehicle technology trade secret theft, a federal district court judge ordered the former director of hardware of WeRide Corp., Kun Huang, to return all files he allegedly downloaded from WeRide before his departure in 2018. WeRide formerly credited Huang with its success in becoming the fastest autonomous vehicle company to complete its first public road test. Now, WeRide alleges Huang copied confidential information from a company shared-laptop, deleted files from the laptop, cleared its web browsing history, and then erased the hard drive on his WeRide-issued personal MacBook. Shortly thereafter, Huang began working at Zhong Zhi Xing Technology Co., Ltd. (ZZX), another defendant in the case, which WeRide alleges was founded by its former CEO, Jing Wang, also named as a defendant.
Based on these allegations, the Court granted WeRide a preliminary injunction against Huang and his new companies, ZZX and a related entity AllRide.AI, Inc., barring these parties from using or sharing WeRide’s trade secrets and requiring them to return all WeRide materials within four days of the order.
This case is but one of many recent trade secret disputes amongst Silicon Valley autonomous vehicle technology companies. And with autonomous vehicle employee turnover high and trillions of dollars at stake, we expect to see many more trade secret disputes arise.
Non-compete agreements have long been used by employers as an effective tool to protect their valuable trade secrets and confidential information. However, employers’ overuse of non-compete agreements and employers’ practice of requiring all of their employees to sign non-compete agreements recently has come under significant attack by federal and state governments. In July, Trade Secrets Watch discussed some of those recent attacks. Since July, there have been a number of additional efforts by government to prohibit the overuse of non-compete agreements. READ MORE
As many TSW readers are aware, 2016 has been a big year for trade secret law, with both the United States and the European Union expanding trade secrets protections and increasing the uniformity of their laws. But as good as this year has been for trade secrets protection, it’s been every bit as bad for noncompete agreements.
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Jimmy John’s can’t seem to escape the limelight. Last year, the company made headlines (discussed here) when employees hit it with a putative class action lawsuit seeking to invalidate their non-compete agreements. The District Court determined that the employees did not have standing to pursue their claims, and never reached the issue of whether the non-competes were valid. Just last month, the Illinois Attorney General filed suit against Jimmy John’s over the same non-compete agreements. READ MORE
The Council of Ministers announced that the Luxembourg presidency had reached a “provisional agreement” with the European Parliament representatives regarding a new Trade Secret Directive (“Provisional Directive”) on December 15, 2015. READ MORE
As Trade Secrets Watch has previously reported, new rules regarding the protection of trade secrets are on the horizon for the European Union. In November 2013, the European Commission announced a proposed Directive on trade secrets and confidential information. Around six months later, in May 2014, the Council of the European Union agreed on a revised draft Directive. Reception of the Trade Secrets Directive has been mixed. READ MORE
Congress is getting into the non-compete business. Citing the use of non-compete agreements by companies such as Jimmy John’s sandwich shops, Senate Democrats recently introduced a bill—called the Mobility and Opportunity for Vulnerable Employees (MOVE) Act—that would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to prohibit the use of non-compete agreements for low-wage employees. READ MORE
