USA Law

Trade Secret Information

Trade Secret Information in the United States

Trade Secret Cases in the U.S. States

by Rachel Glas
California leads the country in trade-secret litigation, according to a new statistical analysis published in the Gonzaga Law Review in 2011. The study, conducted by O’Melveny & Myers attorneys, examined 358 state appellate court decisions issued over the course of 14 years and determined that about half of all trade-secret litigation was concentrated in just five states.

California clocked in at the top, with more trade-secret cases than any other state–in part because it’s the nation’s most populous.

When it came to difficult-to-prove cases involving allegations of pilfered customer lists, more than two-thirds were filed here, the researchers say.

Trade-secret litigation is a growing area of law, especially in federal courts, where the number of cases has nearly doubled each decade since the 1950s. Researchers note that this form of intellectual property theft–which costs companies an estimated $300 billion each year–tends to originate close to home: In more than 90 percent of the cases studied, the accused misappropriator was either an employee or a business partner.

The Top 5 U.S. trade-secret litigation

1 California 16%
2 Texas 11%
3 Ohio 10%
4 New York 6%
5 Georga 6%

Source: A Statistical Analysis of Trade Secret Litigation in State Courts, 46 Gonz. L. Rev. 57 (2011)

Trade Secret Information and the State Laws

Select from the list of U.S. States below for state-specific information on Trade Secret Information:

 

Trade Secret Legislation in the U.S. States

Introduction to the Uniform Trade Secrets Act

The Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA), published by the Uniform Law Commission (ULC) in 1979 and amended in 1985, was a uniform act of the United States.
Select from the information in this legal Encyclopedia the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA) information.

From the Prefatory Note of the Uniform law:

“A valid patent provides a legal monopoly for seventeen years in exchange for public
disclosure of an invention. If, however, the courts ultimately decide that the Patent Office
improperly issued a patent, an invention will have been disclosed to competitors with no
corresponding benefit. In view of the substantial number of patents that are invalidated by the
courts, many businesses now elect to protect commercially valuable information through reliance upon the state law of trade secret protection. Kewanee Oil Co. v. Bicron Corp., 416 U.S. 470 (1974), which establishes that neither the Patent Clause of the United States Constitution nor the federal patent laws pre-empt state trade secret protection for patentable or unpatentable information, may well have increased the extent of this reliance.

The recent decision in Aronson v. Quick Point Pencil Co., 99 S.Ct. 1096, 201 USPQ 1
(1979) reaffirmed Kewanee and held that federal patent law is not a barrier to a contract in which someone agrees to pay a continuing royalty in exchange for the disclosure of trade secrets concerning a product.

Notwithstanding the commercial importance of state trade secret law to interstate business, this law has not developed satisfactorily.”

Resources

See Also

  • Trade Names
  • Trade Secret
  • Secret Service
  • Boards Of Trade
  • Proprietary Information

Further Reading

Posted

in

, ,

by

Robert

Tags:

,