The conventional wisdom among attorneys and litigants in the noncompete and trade secret arena is that the cases are all about the injunctions, usually at the TRO and interlocutory injunction stage.  Some judgments handed down around the country in the last month, however, prove that the damages portion of these cases can be just as devastating to a defendant deemed to be unfairly competing.

In my home state of Georgia, a Savannah jury rendered a $30 million verdict in favor of an energy services company in a suit against its former president and other executives.  The plaintiff alleged, and the jury obviously agreed, that some of the defendants stole trade secrets and wrongfully solicited customers as part of a conspiracy to “hit the ground running” upon jumping ship to their former employer’s rivals.

In St. Louis, a state court judge slammed a husband-wife team with a judgment of $10MM — $1.6MM in compensatory damages and $8.4MM in punitives — for misappropriating trade secrets from the husband’s former employer and working with a Chinese company to make and sell imitations of the plaintiff’s products — coatings for microchips.  The plaintiff and their attorneys, however, should hold off on the down payments for the victory Porsches — the defendants are reportedly nowhere to be found and may have left the country, most likely with pockets full of coated microchips.

Finally, a long-running, tank battle-like suit between two rival software companies finally ended (not counting the likely appeal) with the original plaintiff getting hit by a Nebraska jury with a $43.8MM award on the defendant’s counterclaim.  The plaintiff started the litigation by suing its rival for alleged software pirating, and those claims were rejected by a jury last year.  The defendant counterclaimed for breach of a nondisclosure agreement (entered, ironically, to try and head off the plaintiff’s pirating claims), antitrust violations, and tortious interference with business relationships, resulting in the crippling verdict. The moral of this story is that if you pick a fight, as the plaintiff did here, you better be prepared to finish it.

BURR POINT:  Former employees and businesses who are inclined to push the envelope on restrictive covenant agreements (“I’ll just do it until a judge shuts me down”) should be mindful of the potential exposure for tens of millions of dollars in compensatory damages, attorney’s fees and punitive damages to a party who thinks they’ve been wronged.

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