Bridgetree, Inc. v. Red F Marketing LLC

Making employees available for deposition, providing discovery for the alleged trade secret in question, and providing expert testimony are sufficient steps to identify alleged trade secrets.

Opinion (Whitney): Li resigned from Bridgetree, Inc., and subsequently gained employment at Red F Marketing. At trial, the jury found that Red F had misappropriated Bridgetree’s trade secrets as relating to compilations of source code. However, the jury explicitly rejected a finding that the individual codes making up the compilation were trade secrets. Therefore, Red F argued that Bridgetree had not sufficiently identified the compilations as trade secrets. The Court pointed to Bridgetree’s production of the code in discovery that it claimed to be a trade secret, Bridgetree’s production of an expert to testify as to what lines of code were copied by Red F, and Bridgetree’s steps to make employees familiar with the code available for deposition as sufficient evidence of the identification of the trade secrets at issue. Finally, the court pointed directly to North Carolina law, which identifies "compilations of information" as part of the definition of what constitutes a trade secret. The Judgment was AFFIRMED.