It’s unseasonably cool here in Washington, DC, where most of our Suits by Suits editors toil.  News about the latest in disputes between employers and executives, however, is always in season.  Here are the latest headlines:

• Ruth Simon and Angus Loten of the Wall Street Journal brought us this excellent take on the rising tide of non-compete litigation.  According to Simon and Loten, non-compete agreements are spreading beyond the executive ranks to sales representatives, engineers, and researchers.  For more, check out our ongoing State-by-State Smackdown series on the changing law of non-competes in various states (here, here, here . . . and here).
• A conference call hosted by AOL’s chief exec Tim Armstrong took an unpleasant turn when Armstrong fired – on the spot – Abel Lenz, an employee who was videotaping the call.  The New York Times reported that Armstrong later admitted that he made a “mistake” in the hasty firing, which was broadcast to a thousand employees.  Lenz’s photos of his last moments at AOL later surfaced online at jimromenesko.com. 
• The Third Circuit upheld a decision by the Luzerne County (PA) Retirement Board to terminate the benefits it was paying to a former county clerk, William Brace, based on Brace’s guilty plea to a bribery charge.  Brace claimed that the termination violated his constitutional rights, but the court disagreed, holding that Brace was not entitled to a hearing before the decision.  Brace’s crime appears to have been the acceptance of a $1,500 tailor-made suit from a county contractor, which puts this case in the unique category of Suits by Suits over Suits.
• Matt Reynolds of Courthouse News Service reported that IMAX has sued a competitor for trade secret misappropriation.  IMAX’s complaint alleges that Gary Tsui, a former IMAX employee, sold its 2-D and 3-D conversion technology to the competitor, GDC Technology USA, which is now using the secrets to compete with IMAX.  It calls Tsui an “international fugitive.”  Sounds like this case may be exciting enough for the big screen.
• A former U.S. Bank manager, Serge Adamov, has successfully appealed the dismissal of his claim that he was terminated in retaliation for complaints of discrimination based on his Azerbaijani origin.  The Sixth Circuit held that when an employee does not exhaust his remedies in the Department of Labor before bringing suit in federal court, that failure does not deprive a district court of jurisdiction over the case.  As a result, because the bank did not raise a failure to exhaust as part of its motion to dismiss Adamov’s suit, the district court could not raise it on its own as a ground to get rid of the claim.

• Discrimination
• Motions to Dismiss
• Noncompete Agreements ‎
• The Inbox
• Trade Secrets

Non-Compete In Employment Agreement Enforceable Even If It Wasn’t Mentioned In Offer Letter

Non-competes – those contractual agreements that, when enforceable (and enforced) can keep an executive from leaving one job for a job with a competitor – are frequent topics here at Suits-by-Suits, almost as common as the Brood II cicadas were supposed to be here in our home base of Washington, D.C. 

So, a story on non-competes is not unique for us, but this one has a twist.  It raises an unusual enforcement question: does a non-compete have to be included in both an offer letter and an employment agreement, or is including it in the agreement alone – and conditioning the offer of employment on signing that agreement – enough to make it enforceable? 

Last week, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that it’s the final employment agreement that matters, and if the non-compete clause is in the final agreement, then it doesn’t matter if the clause was in the offer letter or not. 

• Trade Secrets

Today we're going to look at a federal statute that is increasingly becoming central to disputes between outgoing executives and their former employers -- a statute originally designed to prohibit computer "hacking."

Now, if you’re anything like me, when you hear the word “hacking,” you probably envision Matthew Broderick using a dial-up modem to break into his high school’s computer and change his grades.  (In fact, Broderick pulled this same trick twice in the 1980s; first in WarGames and then again in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.)  Indeed, if you asked the average person to define “hacking,” they would probably come up with something like WarGames; that is, they would consider hacking to be breaking into a computer or network to which you were not given permission to access, in order to do something nefarious, like changing your grades or starting World War III.

It probably comes as no surprise that after those blockbuster movies (and some real-life events, too), Congress enacted a statute to prohibit “hacking” back in the heyday of the 1980s.  That statute – the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) – is still the law today, and is codified at 18 U.S.C. §§ 1030.

But what you might not know is that in many areas of the country, there's a court-interpreted disconnect between the CFAA’s definition of hacking and Matthew Broderick.  That disconnect, in turn, has become a very real issue today for departing executives and their employers.  For example, if you’ve been fired and you delete files off of your laptop before returning it, you may be civilly and even criminally liable under the CFAA in some jurisdictions.  (International Airport Centers, LLC v. Citrin, 440 F.3d 418 (7th Cir. 2006).  (Less relevant – but more salacious – is the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute a mom under the CFAA for lying about her age on MySpace.)  United States v. Drew, 259 F.R.D. 449 (C.D. Calif. 2009).

It all depends on how the courts in your area interpret the CFAA.  Read on....

• Social Media
• The Basics
• Trade Secrets

In Part 1 of this series, we relayed the case of Pamela Hill, an engineer with the Virginia Department of Transportation.  Hill was passed over for promotion.  Another applicant, a man, who has less experience than Hill and doesn’t have a college degree like she has, got the job.  VDOT’s only reason for the decision is that the man did better in the interview. 

Hill sued VDOT, alleging sexual discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.  VDOT moved for summary judgment – an early resolution in its favor – and at the end of this post, I’ll tell you if Hill won or not. 

• Discrimination
• Summary Judgment
• Trade Secrets

Engineer Milos Milosevic may have thought that he and Schlumberger Technology Corporation were like oil and water when he recently left Schlumberger, which provides services to the oil and gas industry, to work for Halliburton Company, a direct competitor.  On Friday, a Texas state court said not so fast, and issued a temporary restraining order (or TRO) against Dr. Milosevic that prohibits him from starting his new job at Halliburton.  The court also ordered Dr. Milosevic to “restrain from using or disclosing [Schlumberger’s] trade secrets,” and to “immediately return” any of Schlumberger’s documents or other property.  Schlumberger requested the TRO at the outset of a lawsuit that it filed against Dr. Milosevic for breach of a non-compete contract and misappropriation of trade secrets. 

• Breach of Contract
• Preliminary Injunction
• Trade Secrets

In last week’s Inbox, we briefly discussed the dispute between rival insurers Aon and Alliant Insurance Services, Inc.; that lawsuit centers around Aon’s allegations that Alliant raided Aon’s top executives in violation of those employees' covenants not to compete contained within their employment agreements with Aon.  That dispute is currently being fought via two parallel lawsuits brought in two different states, New York and California.

Ordinarily, the plaintiff is “master of his or her complaint,” meaning that even if a lawsuit could be brought in multiple jurisdictions, courts will typically defer to the forum chosen by the plaintiff.  When parties have claims against each other but prefer different states, this doctrine often results in a so-called “race to the courthouse” in which the first party to file “wins” his or her chosen forum.  The “first filed” complaint – the “winner,” if you will, then typically moves to either stay or dismiss the second-filed parallel jurisdiction in the “loser’s” state, and the “loser’s” court almost always complies.  This may not be high-minded justice, but it is routine.

Or so we thought.

• Breach of Contract
• Trade Secrets

For two centuries, intellectual property disputes between employees and employers were guided by a relatively simple principle:  if you did something “in the workplace” – and you didn’t specifically bargain with your employer to keep it – then what you did was “on the clock” and that work product belongs to your employer.

If you’re a business professional or a lawyer reading this blog, chances are that notion seems awfully quaint right about now.  You know that smartphones are ubiquitous in our respective professions, and business gets done 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  That important client email gets answered at midnight on a Saturday from your basement – not at 9 am the next Monday from your office.

Whether our brave new wireless world is a mixed blessing is probably beyond the scope of this blog.  But one of the things we have noted is that the increasing commingling of the “workplace” with “personal” space is blazing new trails in previously settled areas of the law.  We look at another recent development in this area in context after the jump.

• Social Media
• Trade Secrets

That’s the question presented by a recent lawsuit filed by Sergei Aleynikov, a computer programmer who was a Vice President at Goldman Sachs responsible for code relating to Goldman’s high frequency trading business (more on “HFT” here) before he left to work for a hedge fund – allegedly bringing Goldman’s “secret sauce” code with him.  We’ve observed before that contractual rights to indemnification can sometimes lead to head-scratching results, but, depending on the outcome, this case may take the cake.  Plus, it nicely illustrates key concepts about indemnification (our focus today) and advancement (our focus later this week).

• D&O
• Indemnification and Advancement
• Trade Secrets

News in suits by suits for you to ponder once you’ve tired of reading about replacement refs and bacon:

• Every law librarian I know is a kind, mild-mannered person who would never dream of threatening to bash you with a crowbar.  But Donald Raymond, formerly of Southern Illinois University, was accused of making such a threat, and was fired shortly after the allegation.  Karen Sloan at the National Law Journal writes that Raymond sued his employer after his termination, and that his case has now survived a motion to dismiss. 

• Breach of Contract
• Trade Secrets
• Whistleblowers
• Wrongful Termination

We’ve previously written about the disputes that can arise when an employee leaves a job to start a competing company, such as claims that the employee has misappropriated trade secrets or breached confidentiality provisions.  Sometimes the employers win these cases.  And sometimes, they lose in a big way – as the American Chemical Society (ACS) found out in a case that went all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court.  Am. Chem. Soc’y v. Leadscope, Inc., Slip Opinion No. 2012-Ohio-4193. That court's recent decision serves as a caution to employers: if you don’t have reliable evidence that anything’s been stolen, but you sue your employees’ new business anyway, you can end up on the wrong end of a large verdict. 

• Confidentiality
• Trade Secrets