The U.S. Supreme Court’s May 22, 2017 decision in TC Heartland effectively shifts a significant number of patent litigations out of courts previously deemed acceptable to courts in other venues in which the defendant corporation is incorporated.  In reaching this decision, the Supreme Court relied upon its 1957 decision in Fourco Glass interpreting the patent venue statute. Defendant corporations in Cobalt Boats v. Sea Ray Boats and Brunswick, a patent case scheduled to start trial in…

Engineers from your China subsidiary just joined a competing company which has begun using your trade secrets.  Can you sue in the US and avoid the uncertainty and expense of seeking relief in a Chinese court?  The answer is that both federal Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) of 2016 and California’s version of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (CUTSA), under the right circumstances, may be extended extraterritorially to reach misappropriation outside of the US. Perhaps…

Alarms sounded when John Absmeier, technical director of Delphi Automotive’s Silicon Valley autonomous vehicle project, announced he was leaving to join Samsung’s Silicon Valley innovation center where he would lead a self-driving car technology team.  They grew louder upon Delphi’s determination that Absmeier downloaded hundreds of thousands of company files and folders onto personal devices prior to giving notice, deleted tens of thousands of files of unknown subject matter on or before giving notice, and…

The question is whether it is possible to get a court to enter partial summary judgment before trial on some but not all of the trade secrets that the defendant is accused of stealing. As discussed in the Sept 28 post, the answer is that this may not be possible if the lawsuit is filed in California state court. But if the trade secret lawsuit is filed in federal court, the answer is yes.…

Not necessarily in California. The answer depends upon the unsettled issue whether California summary adjudication rules allow courts to dismiss some but not all of the asserted trade secrets before trial. Trade secret claims brought by a technology company typically allege theft of not one but many trade secrets.  The law recognizes as separate and specific trade secrets not just a particular technology, but also the underlying research, study, tests or investigation relating to this…