On June 24th, Lex Machina hosted a webcast on the recently released Trade Secret Litigation Report 2021. Seth Gerber, Partner at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, and Dawn Mertineit, Partner at Seyfarth Shaw, discussed recent trends in trade secret litigation and how the findings in the report affect their practices. The webcast was moderated by Gloria Huang, legal content associate and editor of the report.
They discussed overarching trends in trade secret litigation including:
- Filing trends, including a look at Defend Trade Secrets Act claims
- The most active districts, judges, and law firms
- Injunctive relief grant/denial rates
- The influence that case resolutions and findings can have on case strategies
- Recent trends in damages
Ms. Mertineit discussed DTSA claims, “When the DTSA was first passed, I think everyone thought that it was going to create uniformity. Even though all states except New York right now have some form of the Uniform Trade Secret Act, each state interprets it a little bit differently. But what I have found is that even with the supposed uniform DTSA, we’re seeing different courts analyze them along the same lines as the state court counterparts.”
When asked to discuss damages, Mr. Gerber remarked “trade secret theft is a huge problem, obviously, in the United States and it’s costing billions of dollars to our economy and many, many American jobs. These numbers reflect to me still a small fraction of the overall amount of trade secret theft that’s going on in the United States, so I would expect to see larger awards in the future as you see more and more trade secret litigation going on, particularly in federal court[.]”
Listen to a recording of the webcast or read the transcript.