The Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) states very clearly that an injunction issued pursuant thereto may not “prevent a person from entering into an employment relationship,” and that any conditions placed on a former employee’s employment in an injunction must be based on “evidence of threatened misappropriation and not merely on the information the person knows.” (Emphasis added). This language appears to bar injunctive relief under the DTSA based on the “inevitable disclosure doctrine,” which in some states permits a court to enjoin a former employee from working for a competitor—even in the absence of a signed non-compete agreement—if it can be established that the employee would “inevitably” (even if inadvertently) use his or her former employer’s trade secrets on behalf of a new employer. As a result, when the statute was first enacted, many commentators assumed that claims based on the inevitable disclosure doctrine would quickly be shot down. In practice, however, that does not appear to be the case. At the very least, some recent federal court decisions have sown confusion around this issue.
We recently wrote about a federal court’s ruling in the Northern District of Illinois that applied the inevitable disclosure doctrine to a DTSA claim. Despite its non-precedential value, this ruling was significant because it interpreted a federal law to allow the application of a doctrine that has been expressly rejected in several states, including California, Maryland, and Virginia, and, again, appears to be barred by the plain language of the DTSA. That case can perhaps be explained by the fact that it was decided on a motion to dismiss, not a motion for injunctive relief, and thus the DTSA’s apparent prohibition on basing an injunction on inevitable disclosure was not necessarily implicated. The same cannot be said about a decision that was issued just three weeks later by the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in which the Court applied the inevitable disclosure doctrine in the context of a temporary restraining order. The case is Fres-co Systems USA, Inc. v. Hawkins, 2017 WL 2376568 (3rd Cir. June 1, 2017).
Continue Reading The Third Circuit Addresses the Defend Trade Secrets Act and Appears to Have Applied the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine