Last month a jury in Los Angeles Superior Court found a former employee of a medical company guilty of stealing the company’s trade secrets. Yonging Zou stole technical information from St. Jude Medical Inc. relating to medical equipment like pacemakers and defibrillators. He used that information to set up a rival business, Nervicon, in China.
The jury ordered Yonging Zou to pay St. Jude Medical Inc. $1.47 billion and Nervicon to pay St. Jude $868 million. The final award was actually more than St. Jude initially asked for, $1.2 billion. St. Jude used the testimony of an expert witness to arrive at that amount. The foreperson of the jury told newspapers that he and his fellow jurors thought the expert was a little too conservative. The use of appropriate expert witnesses and damage calculations are important matters for a Los Angeles litigation lawyer to take into account in these types of cases.
American companies face tough competition from their Chinese counterparts. Increasingly, however, the American firms also face theft of their intellectual property, which Chinese companies can use to reproduce the technology and make sales in China at a fraction of the costs for the American ones.
In this case, Zou’s theft could have enabled him to make substantial money out of the $4.6 billion market in China for implantable medical devices like the kind St. Jude manufactures. Protecting a company’s intellectual property is one of the most important things a Los Angeles litigation attorney can do for a company.