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Eric Fanchiang

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Eric Fanchiang is a counsel in Crowell & Moring’s Orange County office and is a member of the firm’s Antitrust and Competition Group. His practice focuses primarily on antitrust litigation for both defendants and plaintiffs and on government investigations. He has experience across a broad range of industries, including technology, transportation, and digital media. Eric represents his clients on a wide range of antitrust issues, including standard setting, trade association policies, misuse of patents and trade secrets, and price fixing.

While in law school, Eric was a staff editor and a lead notes editor of the UC Irvine Law Review and a research assistant to Professor Kenneth Simons, where he researched issues related to the drafting of the Restatement of the Law Third, Torts: Intentional Torts to Persons.

Eric is active in the local bar, serving as a director for the Orange County Asian American Bar Association and is a current member of the Governing Council of the University of California, Irvine School of Law Alumni Association. He was recently named a 2020 Distinguished Alumnus by the University of California, Irvine Alumni Association.

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California Business and Professions Code section 16600 states that “every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void.” This statute has been interpreted to mean that noncompete agreements in employment contracts are per se invalid in California as an unlawful restraint on trade. Quidel Corp. v. Super. Ct., 39 Cal. App. 5th 530, 539 (2019). However, on August 29, 2019, in Quidel Corp. v. Superior Court, the California Court of Appeal declined to extend this prohibition against noncompetes to circumstances outside of the employment context.
Continue Reading California Declines to Extend Ban on Noncompetes Outside of Employment Context

What could be worse than a competitor misappropriating your trade secret? When a group of competitors conspire to misappropriate your trade secret! Especially in light of a recent decision from the Third Circuit, which held that agreeing to steal a trade secret is not automatically an antitrust violation, meaning it could be very expensive to…