A Pennsylvania federal judge grants Ex-PharMerica Executive’s motion for summary judgment. PharMerica, a company that provides long-term care pharmacy services to organizations such as senior living communities, filed suit against ex-executive Lena Sturgeon and two other ex-PharMerica employees in September 2016. A decision on defendant’s motion for summary judgment was released on March 16, 2018.
The company accused the ex-employees of misappropriating trade secrets after leaving PharMerica to launch a rival company called ContinuaRX LLC. PharMerica argued that trade secrets arose from its marketing plans, software, training programs, and customer service metrics, along with documents created to assist PharMerica’s employees with doing their jobs. In its decision, Judge Cercone noted that PharMerica admitted, however, that: there was nothing trade secret or confidential about the customers in its market; pricing and margins in long-term care pharmacy marketplace are largely fixed by Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates; nearly all pharmacies follow state Medicaid comparable reimbursement strategies; and PharMerica trains customers on software that contains no prohibition against customer disclosure, among other relevant facts invalidating PharMerica’s arguments.
The Court held that “PharMerica may have certain ‘trade secrets’ that deserve protection, but in this instance has failed to identify a single quality, attribute, or feature of any of these alleged trade secrets described in a general sense above.” Lastly, PharMerica failed to “direct this Court to any evidence that Sturgeon and/or ContinuaRx have improperly acquired, disclosed, used or threatened to sue any specific trade secret.”
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