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Category Archives: Trade Secret
A recent arbitration decision underlines how valuable trade secrets are to companies. The trade secret dispute arose between two manufacturers – ADE-ES Inc. and Norit Americas Inc. ADE-ES specializes in developing clean coal technology. Norit is the world’s largest producer of activated carbon, which is used in a variety of fields from health and environmental applications to industrial manufacturers. The two companies recently settled their dispute for $40.5 million. Norit alleged that ADA and two former Norit employees stole trade secrets from Norit. Earlier this year in April, an arbitration panel found the defendants liable for misappropriating trade secrets and for not properly paying royalties to Norit on certain activated carbon sales. Two weeks ago, the companies reached a settlement in the aftermath of the arbitration decision. In addition to the $40.5 million that ADA has to pay Norit, the defendants will remain on the hook for royalties on certain…
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Trade secrets and intellectual property are particularly important in investment and money-managing firms. The success of these firms may be tied to just a handful of prescient employees or computer algorithms. If either leaves a company, the company’s downfall may soon follow. This type of situation is playing itself out in a Los Angeles court in the trial of TCW Group Inc. versus its former investment chief, Jeffrey Gundlach. TCW accuses Gundlach of plotting with several other workers to steal the company’s trade secrets and start a rival management firm. TCW’s lawyer described the case in his opening statement as, “They tried to seal an entire business from TCW worth hundreds of millions of dollars.” What tipped TCW off to possible devious behavior was when, just after a month after firing Gundlach, half of TCW’s fixed-income professional advisors left the firm to join Gundlach’s new firm. Gundlach had been a…
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Technology giants Oracle and Hewlett-Packard (“H-P”) are facing each other in court after H-P claimed that a former executive left H-P to join Oracle and took H-P trade secrets along with him. Adrian Jones left H-P back in February and joined Oracle as a senior vice president. Two months after he left, H-P discovered that he had copied hundreds of files and thousands of e-mails onto a Western Digital external hard drive. H-P’s “discovery” turned out to be erroneous, though. As the lawsuit continued, H-P learned that Jones had not transferred data to a Western Digital external hard drive at all. Who did transfer the data then? It turns out that it was H-P itself. It made an image of Jones’s laptop hard drive back in December when it was investigating him for ethics violations. Now Oracle is demanding that H-P withdraw its lawsuit against Jones. The investigation triggered by…
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