Opinion ID: 151632
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Botticella's Use of Confidential Information Following the Hostess Offer

Text: In the period between when Botticella accepted the Hostess offer on October 15, 2009, and when he ceased working for Bimbo on January 13, 2010, he continued to have all the access to Bimbo's confidential and proprietary information befitting a trusted senior executive. For instance, Botticella attended a meeting with Bimbo's president and other Bimbo officers in December 2009 at which the participants discussed confidential information regarding the company's strategic plan for California. Botticella concedes that if he had disclosed his intention to work for Hostess, Bimbo would have restricted his access to this and other types of information. Indeed, Botticella maintains that he no longer felt comfortable being privy to Bimbo's confidential information following his acceptance of the Hostess offer and that, accordingly, when he received emails and electronic documents containing confidential information, he deleted them, and that when he was exposed to confidential information during presentations at meetings, he blocked it out of his head. App. at 195, 197. [4] In one instance over the Christmas holiday, Botticella deleted a number of documents from his company-issued laptop computer. These documents included both items of a personal nature, such as his resume, and a number of work-related documents containing confidential information. Botticella claimed that he deleted these documents because he didn't think th[ey] would [have] any value to anybody. App. at 198. Nevertheless, when Botticella returned to his office at Bimbo on January 4, 2010, he asked a computer technician to restore the files because he wanted to have them back just in case for the next weeks we needed to have a meeting or something. App. at 198. Bimbo's technician then restored the files to the computer. Following Botticella's departure, Bimbo hired E. Brian Harris, a computer forensics expert, to investigate Botticella's use of his company laptop during December 2009 and January 2010. Harris's testing revealed that a user who logged in as Botticella had accessed a number of confidential documents during the final weeks of Botticella's employment at Bimbo. In particular, the testing revealed that the person logging in as Botticella had accessed twelve files within a span of thirteen seconds on January 13, 2010, Botticella's last day at Bimbo. [5] Significantly this access occurred minutes after the phone call in which Botticella finally disclosed to Bimbo his plans to work for Hostess and Bimbo told him to cease working for it. There were several similar patterns of access in the weeks leading up to January 13. According to Harris, this type of activitymultiple files being accessed more or less simultaneouslywas inconsistent with an ordinary usage whereby individual files are opened and either read or edited. App. at 238. Harris concluded that the activity was, however, consistent with copying a group of files at the same time, but he could not determine conclusively whether the files Botticella had accessed had been copied and deleted or never copied at all. App. at 238. The testing also revealed that three external storage devicesa portable device known as a thumb or flash drive and two external hard driveshad at one time or another been connected to Botticella's computer, although it was unclear exactly when these devices had been used. Bimbo located the thumb drive and one of the hard drives but Harris could not determine conclusively whether or not any files had been copied onto the devices from Botticella's computer. Harris was not provided with the second external hard drive. According to Bimbo, that device is unaccounted for. Appellee's br. at 11. A number of the files accessed from Botticella's laptop during his final days at Bimbo were highly sensitive and their possession by a competitor would have been damaging to Bimbo. As described by the District Court, these documents include Bimbo's cost-reduction strategies, product launch dates, anticipated plant and line closures, labor contract information, production strengths and weaknesses of many Bimbo bakeries, and the cost structure for individual products by brand. Bimbo Bakeries, 2010 WL 571774, at . There were, however, more mundane documents such as a presentation titled Safety Short-Wet Floors included in these groups of files. App. at 237. In his videotaped deposition, portions of which were presented at the preliminary injunction hearing, Botticella admitted to copying files periodically from his laptop to external devices during his final weeks at Bimbo, but maintained that he had done so only to practice his computer skills in preparation for his new position at Hostess. Despite an earlier denial, he eventually admitted to conducting such practice exercises in January 2010. The District Court found that Botticella's explanation of his use of the laptop computer and the external devices was confusing at best and not credible. Bimbo Bakeries, 2010 WL 571774, at .