Intellectual Property Law

TradingMarkets.com is reporting that Agilent Technologies, Inc. is suing Advanced Materials Technology Inc. in Delaware for breach of confidentiality agreements, misappropriation of trade secrets, and breach of fiduciary duties relating to its high-performance liquid chromatography or HPLC technology, whatever that is. Agilent alleges that three employees of Advanced, formerly of Agilent, took Agilent trade secrets and confidential information and used it for the benefit of Advanced in developing its Halo HPLC. The story is here.

Do you notice a trend with these cases? Bonus points if you said that most of them relate to former employees leaving for another company and using their former company’s trade secrets and confidential information to compete unfairly.

These cases all have one thing in common–they will turn on the strength of the plaintiff’s trade secrets protection plan. A strong plan that is effectively implemented will generally allow recovery, while on the other hand, companies with no plans, or companies who don’t effectively implement their protection plans will generally be denied recovery.

We will follow this case as it develops to analyze the strength of Agilent’s trade secrets protection plan and its implementation.