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…