Chancery Imposes Penalties for Misappropriation of Trade Secrets

Posted on February 22, 2010 by Francis Pileggi

Agilent Technologies, Inc, v. Kirkland, No. 3512-VCS (Del. Ch. Feb. 18, 2010), read 93-page opinion here.This magnum opus by the Delaware Court of Chancery was initially issued under seal but is now available for your reading pleasure.

A longer overview of this case will be provided soon, but in the meantime, I wanted to make this opinion available for downloading. For anyone interested in the latest iteration of Delaware law on misappropriation of trade secrets and the remedies available for breach of the Delaware Uniform Trade Secrets Act, this decision is must reading.

As a side note, students of Delaware law will observe that although not granted by the Court in this case, the trade secrets statute is one of the only bases on which the Court of Chancery is vested with authority to grant punitive damages.

  • anonymous

    That was very informative and well written. Nowadays many companies face issues related to protecting their trade secrets. Recently I happened to read an article on “Secrecy obligations of Employees” which talks about the current issue. I found that the article is very informative. Mentioned below is an excerpt of the mentioned article.
    “Trade Secrets form an important part of intellectual property owned by most knowledge driven companies. Infact, patents and others are just the tip of the intellectual property ice berg of a company, the rest being trade secrets. Most countries including India do not have legislations protecting trade secrets and the law with respect to…..”read more at http://www.sinapseblog.com/2010/12/secrecy-obligations-of-employees.html