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On March 16, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed defendant Shan Shi’s conviction for conspiracy to commit theft of trade secrets. Given recent efforts at the state and now federal level to ban non-competes, employers may be more likely to consider partnering with law enforcement to remedy trade secret theft.

The Court’s opinion begins with the statement, “We can’t always get what we want, but, sometimes, we get what we need.” Unfortunately, the Court’s opinion continues, what Shi’s company needed were seven documents containing a competitor’s trade secret information for manufacturing drill riser buoyancy modules…
Continue Reading D.C. Circuit Affirms Federal Jury’s Conviction of Texas Drilling Executive for Trade Secret Theft

The Court of Appeals for the Sixth Appellate District of Texas at Texarkana issued an opinion on November 24, 2020 in Titan Oil & Gas Consultants LLC v. David W. Willis and RIGUP, Inc., a case addressing application of a non-competition provision in the independent contractor context in the oil and gas drilling and production industry in the Permian Basin and elsewhere. Titan addressed non-competition claims of interest both to those focused on the Texas arcana of the state’s restrictive covenant statute and jurisprudence and to those more generally interested in applying restrictive covenants to independent contractors.  Each area…
Continue Reading Non-Compete Boilerplate Loses Steam Where Independent Contractor Receives Call and Confidences Directly

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit opened its October 29th opinion in Cardoni v. Prosperity Bank by noting that “[i]n addition to their well-known disagreements over boundaries and football” known as the Red River Rivalry, “Texas and Oklahoma do not see eye to eye on a less prominent issue: covenants not to compete.”   As the Court went on to note, “Texas generally allows them so long as they are limited both geographically and temporally… Oklahoma generally does not.”  “These different policy choices—Texas’s view which prioritizes parties’ freedom to contract and Oklahoma’s which emphasizes the right…
Continue Reading “Red River Rivalry” Reaches Right To Restrict Employment

A recent Texas case provides a good lesson about workplace paperwork formalities. In Holloway v. Dekkers and Twin Lakes Golf Course, Inc., a Texas appellate court ruled that a one-year employment agreement that was not signed by the employer fell within the statute of frauds and was therefore unenforceable.
Continue Reading Texas Appellate Court Finds That Yearly Employment Contract Not Signed By Employer Is Unenforceable