Welcome to WilmerHale’s bulletin on recent trade secret case law and relevant news items. We’ve affectionately nicknamed it “Readily Ascertainable” because, unlike a trade secret, it should be easy to figure out. If you have any questions about these cases or the legal issues they implicate, our trade secret experts would be delighted to answer them.
This installment of Readily Ascertainable covers a Fifth Circuit reversal reinstating a RICO complaint premised on trade secret theft, an order requiring a “bill of particulars” identifying alleged trade secrets in a federal criminal prosecution, a summary judgment ruling that partial client lists reconstructed from memory were not trade secrets, and two dismissals of trade secret claims for failure to plead the alleged trade secrets with sufficient particularity.
June 2026
EnvTech, Inc. v. DeBusk, 178 F.4th 208 (5th Cir. 2026)
An industrial cleaning company sued a competitor’s CEO alleging theft of trade secrets as a predicate for civil RICO. The company alleged the CEO directed and conspired with employees—including plaintiff’s former employees—to steal and use a trade secret related to a proprietary oil-refinery cleaning formula and process.
The district court dismissed the complaint, concluding that plaintiff had not plausibly alleged that the CEO personally engaged in trade secret theft with the requisite intent or participated in a pattern of racketeering activity. The Fifth Circuit reversed, holding that plaintiff had sufficiently alleged that the CEO knowingly participated in stealing trade secrets, based on allegations that he actively pursued expansion into plaintiff’s market, knew that former plaintiff employees possessed knowledge of plaintiff’s proprietary cleaning methods, and oversaw efforts to market his competing company’s services based on those employees’ knowledge and expertise. The court also concluded that plaintiff adequately pled a continuous RICO pattern by alleging the CEO had engaged in a continuing “modus operandi,” including (1) personally recruiting employees implicated in cases of trade secret theft from others, and (2) repeatedly hiring competitors’ key employees and then directing them to use their prior employers’ trade secrets for his benefit.
United States v. Ho, No. 25-CR-00003 (JAV), 2026 WL 1535022 (S.D.N.Y. June 1, 2026)
In a prosecution for theft of trading algorithms, a court in the Southern District of New York orders a bill of particulars identifying specific source code secrets but declines to dismiss the indictment.
A former trader at a quantitative trading firm was charged with federal criminal trade secret theft for allegedly copying source code containing trading algorithms and using the stolen code at his competing trading firm. In addition to a lengthy indictment, the government produced a spreadsheet containing a “non-exhaustive” list of 61 Bates numbers corresponding to portions of source code that prosecutors allege constituted the stolen trade secrets. Three days later, the government produced a new spreadsheet, listing 54 source code files (only some of which were included on the first disclosure) that “individually and together constitute[d]” the allegedly stolen trade secrets. The second list purported to “replace” the first.
The defendant moved to dismiss the indictment as vague and sought, in the alternative, an order requiring the government to file a bill of particulars (i.e., a written response containing details about a party’s claim) identifying the alleged trade secrets. The district court denied the defendant’s motion to dismiss the indictment, concluding that just because the identified source code “is voluminous and contains numerous discrete portions that themselves constitute trade secrets does not mean that the [i]ndictment is constitutionally deficient for failure to specify individual file paths or portions of code within the singular Source Code.” However, the court granted the defendant’s request for a bill of particulars, noting that it “is concerned about the government’s shifting representations regarding the precise components of the Source Code that it will claim at trial constitute[s] the Stolen Trade Secrets, including its repeated caveats that it reserves the right to continue to supplement or amend its list defining the Stolen Trade Secrets.”
Edelman Financial Engines, LLC v. Mariner Wealth Advisors LLC, No. 2:23-CV-02515-HLT, 2026 WL 1618502 (D. Kan. June 5, 2026)
A court in the District of Kansas grants summary judgment that financial planners’ partial client lists are not trade secrets.
A group of financial planners who worked for plaintiff were recruited to join defendant, a rival wealth management firm. After being recruited, several of the planners recreated from memory partial lists of the clients they had serviced at their prior firm. Plaintiff sued under federal and state law, claiming defendant’s recreated lists and outreach to those clients misappropriated plaintiff’s trade secrets.
The district court granted summary judgment for the defendant, emphasizing that the planners’ “initial lists were only names” of a subset of clients they had serviced—the wealth managers then used public sources to find contact information, and they obtained non-public information about the clients’ accounts directly from the clients themselves. The court concluded that based on these facts, plaintiff could not prove misappropriation as a matter of law on three related grounds: (1) the plaintiff firm did not have a “master list” of clients, so the scattered sets of client names the managers used were not maintained as a secret; (2) the plaintiff firm had only selectively enforced its restrictive covenants in the past, having failed to sue many other departed employees who had breached agreements; and (3) the partial client lists were not shown to have any independent economic value.
Signant Health Holding Corp. v. Definium Therapeutics, Inc., No. 26-114-GBW, 2026 WL 1893641 (D. Del. July 1, 2026)
A court in the District of Delaware dismisses trade secret claim from clinical trial services provider for failure to plead its alleged trade secret with sufficient particularity.
A provider of software and services for running clinical trials sued its former client—a pharmaceutical company for which it ran a phase 2 clinical trial—under federal law, alleging that the client shared plaintiff’s asserted trade secrets with one of plaintiff’s competitors during bidding for the associated phase 3 clinical trial. Specifically, plaintiff alleged that one of the defendant’s executives shared information about plaintiff’s software, pricing, methodologies, data architecture, and operational know-how because he had a financial interest in the less experienced rival vendor, which ultimately won the phase 3 clinical trial contract and developed a competing software platform similar to plaintiff’s.
The district court dismissed the trade secret claim on the pleadings without prejudice, holding that plaintiff failed to adequately identify the alleged trade secrets with sufficient particularity. The court concluded that the complaint alleged only broad categories of potentially protectable information and failed to identify any specific, proprietary software features that could qualify as trade secrets. Accordingly, the complaint did not “meaningfully distinguish the protected information from general business information, nor [did it] provide facts sufficient to narrow or define the alleged trade secrets at issue.” While plaintiff attempted to narrow its alleged trade secrets in its opposition brief, the court held that plaintiff could not constructively amend its pleadings through briefing, and regardless, the narrowed description still did not satisfy the particularity requirement.
Joby Aero, Inc. v. Archer Aviation Inc., No. 25-CV-10703-SVK, 2026 WL 1625376 (N.D. Cal. June 5, 2026)
A court in the Northern District of California dismisses several categories of alleged trade secrets as insufficiently identified, but allows claim to proceed based on trade secret related to confidential deal terms.
A company developing electric vertical takeoff and landing (“eVTOL”) aircraft sued an eVTOL rival and its own former senior government-relations employee under federal trade secret law after the employee allegedly downloaded numerous confidential files shortly before departing to join the rival.
The district court dismissed three of four categories of alleged trade secrets without prejudice. The court reasoned that the alleged trade secrets were not defined with sufficient particularity because plaintiff relied “merely on ‘catchall’ phrases, such as ‘commercial strategy development” or ‘technical information about [its] aircraft and operations.’” However, the court allowed the claim to proceed based on a fourth category of trade secrets relating to an allegedly valuable strategic partnership agreement with an unnamed real estate developer. The court determined that plaintiff had sufficiently identified two specific trade secrets—the “details of the negotiation” and the final “deal terms,” contained in “specific files” that the employee had exfiltrated.
The court also rejected defendants’ argument that plaintiff failed to plead misappropriation, finding a reasonable inference that the departed employee disclosed the deal terms to plaintiff’s competitor: he had accessed the confidential deal terms, left to join the rival, and—two days later—the real estate developer reported that the rival had learned of those same terms. Finally, the court dismissed plaintiff’s breach of fiduciary duty and tortious interference claims as preempted by the California Uniform Trade Secrets Act (“CUTSA”) because they rested on the same alleged disclosure of proprietary information. Notably, even though the plaintiff had pleaded only a federal claim and no CUTSA claim, the court applied CUTSA preemption because plaintiff “does not argue” that the absence of a CUTSA claim precluded preemption.
