Monetary awards in trade secrets cases continue to grab headlines in 2025. As reported in this recent blog post, a Boston jury awarded a medical device company $452M for theft of trade secrets by a competitor, later reduced to $59.4 in exchange for a permanent injunction. Last month, an Arkansas jury found Walmart liable for trade secret misappropriation and awarded $222M to the plaintiff, Zest Labs, a provider of technology solutions for tracking food freshness. And then there is the $2.036 billion jury award in favor of Appian Software against Pegasystems that was vacated by the Virginia Court of Appeals in 2024 but was granted review by the Virginia Supreme Court just a few months ago. These awards are part of a growing trend of very large monetary awards in trade secrets cases.
Getting trade secrets cases to trial and winning on the merits is arguably easier than in patent cases. One of the main reasons for this belief is that patent infringement cases involve case-dispositive legal issues that courts decide pre-trial: the meaning and scope of the claims and whether claims are sufficiently definite. Many patent cases never get past this Markman stage. While courts in trade secrets cases often must decide whether the asserted trade secret is sufficiently identified to present to a jury, the plaintiff is frequently given several opportunities to fix its articulation of the secret before trial. By contrast, patent claims cannot be fixed during litigation. Moreover, given their fact intensive character, trade secrets cases often have an easier road to trial than patent cases, and strong narratives often emerge from these cases that involve related claims for breach of contractual secrecy obligations and civil conspiracy. A Stout 2024 report pegs trial win rates for plaintiffs bringing trade secret claims in federal court at 84% since 2017, with juries awarding some form of monetary damages in 78% of the cases.
Monetary and non-monetary remedies available for trade secret misappropriation, in both state and federal courts, are robust and relatively easy to access in comparison to patent cases. Patent jurisprudence on remedies often throttles damages recovery in ways that trade secrets law does not, and injunctive relief against post-trial infringement is significantly constrained because courts often regard harm as compensable by the availability of an ongoing royalty. Unlike in utility patent cases, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains is available in trade secret cases and often these alleged gains far exceed any provable economic loss. As with patent cases, proving damages in trade secrets cases depends heavily on expert testimony, but the controlling law in patent cases is far more developed and restrictive than in the trade secrets context when it comes to screening expert damages theories.
Similarly, although both patent and trade secrets law reserve an award of attorneys’ fees to the trial court’s discretion in exceptional cases, the practical threshold for such awards may be lower for successful plaintiffs in trade secrets cases. Last month, a federal court in California awarded attorneys’ fees to the plaintiff who proved misappropriation of only one of twenty-eight asserted trade secrets and only recovered 1.1% of the damages it originally sought. In granting the fees motion, the court held that winning “any significant issue … which achieves some benefit in bringing suit” is sufficient to justify a full recovery of attorneys’ fees.
Trade secret owners’ run of success in courtrooms across the country seems likely to continue. These cases are more likely to go to trial because of their fact-specific nature, and the enhanced remedies available to trade secret holders often justifies rolling the dice. This trend behooves those potentially facing trade secret misappropriation risk to carefully manage that risk through contracts with trade secret owners and to thoughtfully and proactively defend claims asserted against them while realistically evaluating the litigation risk they face.