Emigra Group, LLC v. Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy LLP, et al., No. 07 Civ. 10688 (LAK) (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 31, 2009).

In a decision that should be considerable reassurance to employers in general and law firms in particular, a district judge in New York has rejected an antitrust claim brought by a consulting firm against its former employer, an attorney who returned to his former law firm. 

Emigra, an immigration consulting firm, sued its former vice president of operations, Ryan Freel, and the law firm that was his prior and subsequent employer after Freel resigned from Emigra and returned to practicing law at Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy, an international immigration law firm headquartered in New York. Emigra alleged that Freel took confidential and trade secret information that he had obtained while employed by Emigra, including strategies, customer lists, pricing information, and profit and loss data; disclosed this information to Fragomen; and used it to contact Emigra’s customers on Fragomen’s behalf.

However, the court noted that while Emigra filed “the usual state law claims for misappropriation of trade secrets, unfair competition, and the like,…it did not seek a preliminary injunction.” Instead, Emigra asserted a number of antitrust claims and, the court noted, there is reason to believe that it did so in order to “gain access through pretrial discovery to precisely the sort of competitively sensitive information about Fragomen’s business that Emigra claims Freel improperly disclosed to Fragomen about Emigra’s business.”  

In a lengthy 63-page opinion, the district judge granted the defendants’ summary judgment motion. Among other findings, the court concluded that Emigra had offered no evidence of price control, exclusion of competition, or monopoly power in violation of the antitrust laws, and that “a contrary conclusion would turn many disputes over the hiring by one competitor of an employee of another, the stuff of everyday commercial tort claims, into monopolization or attempted monopolization cases.” The court further noted that Emigra cannot avoid summary judgment through “gamesmanship” by withholding its own evidence while insisting that its competitor reveal its competitively sensitive information. For these and other reasons, the court dismissed the federal antitrust claims on the merits with prejudice, and declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over the remaining state-law trade secret and unfair competition claims. The decision serves as a warning to litigants who might consider pursuing questionable antitrust claims in federal court as a means for obtaining discovery that would not otherwise be available to them in a state court proceeding.