Here at the Law Office of Vincent Miletti, Esq. and the home of the #UnusuallyMotivated movement, we take pride as a resilient and dependable legal services firm, providing such services in both a traditional and online, web-based environment. With mastered specialization in areas such as Employment and Labor Law, Intellectual Property (IP) (trademark, copyright, patent), Entertainment Law, and e-Commerce (Supply Chain, Distribution, Fulfillment, Standard Legal & Regulatory), we provide a range of legal services including, but not limited to traditional legal representation (litigation, mediation, arbitration, opinion letters, and advisory), non-litigated business legal representation and legal counsel, and unique, online legal services such as smart forms, mobile training, legal marketing, and development.

Still, here at Miletti Law®, we feel obligated to enlighten, educate, and create awareness, free of charge, about how these issues and many others affect our unusually motivated® readers and/or their businesses. Accordingly, to achieve this goal, we have committed ourselves to create authoritative, trustworthy, & distinctive content. Usually, this content is featured as videos posted on our YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtvUryqkkMAJLwrLu2BBt6w and blogs that are published on our website WWW.MILETTILAW.COM. With that, the ball is in your court and you have an effortless obligation to subscribe to the channel and sign up for the Newsletter on the website, which encompasses the best way to ensure that you stay in the loop and feel the positive impact of the knowledge bombs that we drop here!

As the authoritative force in Employment Law, it only seemed right to introduce one of the many upcoming series in which we introduce a variety of topics that looks to educate and deliver in a manner that only Miletti Law® can. In this regard, this blog is Part XVI of our ongoing series on “Trade Secret Misappropriation & Restrictive Covenant Claims.” In Part XV, we hammered on “Legal & Practical Considerations for Seeking Injunctive Relief” and mentioned that in order to demonstrate to and convince a court that the situation at hand warrants emergency relief, the employer should seek a TRO and/or preliminary injunction promptly. We also added that by seeking injunctive relief promptly, the court would be put to notice that in the absence of injunctive relief, the movant would suffer irreparable harm. Importantly, in order for the full range of the potential tortious conduct and/or breaches to be understood, the employer should also include an expedited discovery request alongside the TRO or preliminary injunction application.

As a continuation of our discussion, we have switched gears to focus on the “Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine” in our blog titled “The Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine in Seeking Injunctive Relief” and Part XVI of the series.

The Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine in Seeking Injunctive Relief

At times, employees are exposed to or receive confidential information from their employers in the course of employment. Based on the prior position and role of an employee, the employer may find it necessary to prevent such an employee from using competitively valuable information even if they did not “misappropriate” it while departing, such as by way of sending it to their email accounts and/or downloading documents or file into an external hard drive or USB. In many jurisdictions, upon fearing that an employee may disclose confidential information (although there is no proof that the employee ever “took” it) after accepting employment with a competitor, employers are permitted to seek injunctive reliefs against such former employees by asserting the inevitable disclosure doctrine.

When deciding the outcomes of such cases, courts may consider issues such as (1) the nature of the industry and its trade, (2) the degree to which the trade secrets in question would provide the new employer with competitive value, (3) the degree to which the employee’s new position is similar to the former one (such that this employee has to utilize the former employer’s trade secrets in order to fulfill the responsibilities of their new job), and (4) the degree of competitiveness between the new employer (direct competitor) and the employee’s former employer.

However, the inevitable disclosure doctrine is not applicable in some jurisdictions such as Maryland and is definitely, not applied by most courts. Nonetheless, based on the applicable law and particular circumstances, employers may have a variety of options and multiple grounds for obtaining injunctive reliefs against former employees who have, even without the evidence of a “smoking gun,” breached non-compete or non-disclosure agreements or likely to use trade secrets or confidential information they were exposed to in their former employment.

In the next blog titled “Factors Determining the Success of Obtaining Injunctive Relief” and Part XVII of this series, we will shift our focus on factors that determine whether an employer would obtain injunctive relief or not after bringing a claim for trade secret misappropriation and/or breach of a restrictive covenant.

In the meantime, stay tuned for more legal guidance, training, and education. In the interim, if there are any questions or comments, please let us know at the Contact Us page!

Always rising above the bar,

Isaac T.,

Legal Writer & Author.