Tangibly launched in February as a solution for companies to manage their trade secrets. Tangibly offers two distinct products: (1) a cloud-based platform that provides a dashboard where users can manage their assets and associated people and (2) a platform designed to make it easy for companies to execute and track NDAs.
Tangibly’s founder and CEO Tom Londergan said that Tangibly is architected around five questions companies should be able to answer regarding their trade secrets:
Continue Reading New Platform Launches to Manage a Company’s Trade Secrets
Under the California Uniform Trade Secrets Act (CUTSA), and many other states’ trade secret acts, a plaintiff must identify its alleged trade secrets as a prerequisite to conducting discovery. Cal. Civ. Code § 2019.210. The Ninth Circuit recently held that the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) also includes this requirement to identify alleged trade secrets with sufficient particularity. The Ninth Circuit was considering whether the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California had abused its discretion in granting summary judgment for a defendant on CUTSA and DTSA claims by finding that the plaintiff had not identified its trade secrets with sufficient particularity without any discovery. (Spoiler alert: It did.)
On May 22, the Eleventh Circuit clarified trade secrets misappropriation analysis under the Florida Uniform Trade Secrets Act (“FUTSA”), strengthening the trade secret protection offered by the statute. The decision vacated a magistrate judge’s finding that the defendants had not misappropriated trade secretes following a bench trial in the Compulife Software Inc. v. Newman et al. matter (No. 18-12004). The court found error in the magistrate’s failure to “consider the several alternative varieties of misappropriation” contemplated by FUTSA and the magistrate’s reasoning that the public availability of life insurance quotes on the plaintiff’s website “automatically precluded a finding that scraping those quotes constituted misappropriation.”
On April 20, 2020, the Supreme Court granted cert in Van Buren v. United States, to resolve an important circuit split over the meaning of “authorized access” under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). This is the Court’s first foray into analyzing the precise contours of CFAA liability. Van Buren may have far-reaching implications for any individual or business operating in the digital domain, as the scope of civil and criminal liability under the CFAA can impact just about any sort of relationship involving access to computer systems, whether it be employer-employee relationships or third-party relationships.
The COVID-19 pandemic presents unique and unprecedented challenges to the ongoing need to protect confidential information and trade secrets. With entire workforces working remotely, employees are increasingly relying on video services to remain connected, but the increasing prevalence of video services does not come without problems. For example, Zoom Video Communications Inc. (“Zoom”) is a videoconferencing app which allows multiple people to be in the same “virtual room” at once and which has seen an uptick of users since the COVID-19 crisis. While Zoom permits employees to remain in contact, it and other video services also permit employees to use and share confidential information and trade secrets from their home. Now more than ever companies need to be extra vigilant in what platforms they allow their employees to use and how their employees use the platforms.
Crowell & Moring has released its 
On January 25, 2019, the Illinois Supreme Court in Rosenbach v. Six Flags Entertainment Corp. ruled unanimously that plaintiffs do not need to allege “some actual injury or adverse effect” in order to challenge alleged violations of Illinois’