Trade Secrets, Non-Competes and E-Mail Do Not Go Well Together (Unless You Like Punitive Damages) - Part 3

2.24.10    By Joe Kelly    Tags , ,

Things were not going well for Tammy Keymon, the defendant in Hamilton-Ryker Group, LLC v Keymon.  As I noted in the last post, the Court ruled she violated her non-compete.   However, Tammy’s legal woes were far from over.  Her former employer (against whom she had started a competing business the day after resigning) also sued her under Tennessee’s version of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act.

According to Hamilton-Ryker, Keymon stole valuable information about a key client, Verizon, including Verizon’s list of mailing addresses that were used for fulfillment work, the anticipated production schedule for the remainder of the year, internal profit analysis, and invoices for the most recent work.  Notably, Keymon e-mailed herself all of this information as she was leaving Hamilton-Ryker.

Keymon pointed out that all of this information was not really secret–for example, she could have obtained much of the information from Verizon directly.  The Court, in ruling that Keymon misappropriated Hamilton-Ryker’s trade secrets, noted that regardless of whether Keymon could have acquired the information through other means, the fact was that she did not obtain the information by other means.  Despite the fact that individual pieces of information might have been available publicly, Keymon had misappropriated the integrated and aggregated information from the computers of Hamilton-Ryker.  In doing so, she violated Tennessee’s Trade Secret Act.

Related content

  1. Trade Secrets, Non-Competes and E-Mail Do Not Go Well Together (Unless You Like Punitive Damages) - Part 5
  2. Trade Secrets, Non-Competes and E-Mail Do Not Go Well Together (Unless You Like Punitive Damages) - Part 4
  3. Trade Secrets, Non-Competes and E-Mail Do Not Go Well Together (Unless You Like Punitive Damages) - Part 6

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