Previously, I wrote about a decision from the District of New Jersey that declined to apply a heightened pleading standard to Defend Trade Secret Act claims. Now, another federal court has reached the same conclusion. A copy of the opinion can be downloaded below.
In Aggreko, LLC v. Barreto, pending in the District of North Dakota, the plaintiff and one of the defendants, Elite Power, are competitors in the generator-renting industry. Defendant Barreto previously worked as Aggreko’s sales manager. Aggreko alleges that Barreto resigned under false pretenses, thereby hiding his intention to work for Elite Power. And on the way out, Barreto allegedly downloaded Aggreko’s trade secrets and confidential information. Aggreko sued Elite Power and Barreto for violations of the Defend Trade Secret Act, among other claims.
The defendants moved to dismiss, arguing that Aggreko failed to plead its misappropriation claims with sufficient particularity. The court rejected this argument:
All that is required at this stage of the proceedings is an allegation that Barreto misappropriated Aggreko’s trade secrets sufficient to put the defense on notice as to the nature of the claim. Aggreko has alleged Barreto wrongfully acquired its trade secrets and provided them to Elite Power. Aggreko describes its trade secrets as including customer lists and information regarding Aggreko’s operations, customers, business proposals, pricing strategy, client preference and history, and proprietary pricing models known only to Aggreko; a description which the Court finds is clearly adequate under Rule 8. The discovery process will provide the parties with the details relevant to the claims, most of which are known to Barreto.
In this case, it sounds like the plaintiff only offered high-level allegations of the trade secrets at issue. And those allegations survived a motion to dismiss. This, along with the case discussed in my prior post, should be encouraging to trade-secret plaintiffs who are leery of a possible heightened pleading standard in federal court.