Opinion ID: 2048270
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Trade Secret Claim

Text: With those rules in mind, we move on to a consideration of the elements of a cause of action for misappropriation of a trade secret, which are: (1) the existence of a trade secret or secret manufacturing process; (2) the value and importance of the trade secret to the employer in the conduct of his business; (3) the employer's right by reason of discovery or ownership to the use and enjoyment of the secret; and (4) the communication of the secret to the employee while he was employed in a position of trust and confidence and under circumstances making it inequitable and unjust for him to disclose it to others or to use it himself to the employer's prejudice. Garner Tool & Die v. Laux, supra . As the recitation of the evidence in part II above demonstrates, Selection Research does not make clear exactly what it asserts in satisfaction of the first element of this tort. The parties are in apparent agreement that the process whereby a selection instrument is developed is widely known. As this court observed in Garner Tool & Die v. Laux, supra , the subject matter of a trade secret must be secret. Matters of public knowledge or of general knowledge in an industry cannot be appropriated by one as its secret. A trade secret must be a particular secret of the complaining employer and not the general secrets of the trade in which the employer is engaged. A trade secret is something known to only one or a few, kept from the general public, and not susceptible of general knowledge. If the principles incorporated in a device are known to the industry, there is no trade secret which can be disclosed. The nature of a trade secret is such that so long as it remains a secret, it is valuable property to its possessor; a public sale of the article or description of the article in literature available to the public destroys the secret. Garner Tool & Die v. Laux, supra . Clearly, the widely known, publicly documented process whereby a personnel selection instrument is constructed and validated cannot be Selection Research's trade secret, and Selection Research apparently claims no such proprietary interest in this process. Yet, precisely what Selection Research claims as a proprietary interest remains unclear. The evidence suggests that Selection Research's claim of trade secret extends to each of its completed instruments qua instrument; or individually to each of the many questions and listen fors it has developed over the years; or to each question and listen for pair, as both are required for interpretation of a job candidate's responses; or, finally, to the system resulting from the combination of some or all of the foregoing three components. If Selection Research is indeed claiming a trade secret interest in each of its instruments qua instrument, its claim must fail for the simple reason that a comparison of its instruments with the Miller instrument discloses only superficial similarities insufficient to support Selection Research's implicit allegation that the Miller instrument is a copy of one or more of Selection Research's instruments. Certainly, if Selection Research's and defendants' products differed from one another only in a few words, or by a mere rearrangement of nonfunctional aspects of appearance, this court might well conclude that Selection Research's instruments had been misappropriated, or, more tersely stated in this instance, copied. However, in light of Selection Research's uncontroverted evidence that the order in which questions are presented and the precise wording of those questions are the backbone of its instruments' value, this court cannot conclude that the Miller instrument, differing markedly as it does in language, organization, and even in question subject matter, is a literal or functional copy of any Selection Research instrument in evidence or discussed in the record. Rather, the Miller instrument seems to bear only a family resemblance to Selection Research's instruments; hardly surprising, given that both Measurement Systems and Selection Research used essentially the same well-known process to develop interviews to perform essentially similar tasks. If Selection Research is understood to claim a trade secret interest in the various questions and listen fors that make up its instruments, this claim, too, must fail. While a few of Measurement Systems' questions are verbatim or very nearly verbatim duplicates of Selection Research's questions, the latter's contention that Measurement Systems copied Selection Research's questions and listen fors is rebutted by the defendants' contention, supported by the testimony of a member of Selection Research's board of directors, that many of the identical or very similar items were culled from non-Selection Research materials, and Selection Research has not proven itself to have been the source of Measurement Systems' language by the requisite preponderance. Furthermore, none of these questions inquire about any matter so removed in commonsense from the task at hand, that of selecting persons likely to make good franchise restaurant managers, that the resemblance proves anything more than the family resemblance mentioned earlier, albeit made the more suspicious, and perhaps the more likely, by Naticchioni's and Murman's prior acquaintance with Selection Research's uses of language. Nevertheless, without distressing the parties further by disclosing, against their wishes as expressed in repeated joint stipulations both in the district court and in this court, the phrasing of particular questions and listen fors, let us merely point out, by analogy and not by quoting or paraphrasing any question, that the inquiry, Do you like to work with people? may be expressed in few ways more direct, nor should such pointless exercises in variation on a theme be forced upon commercial competitors by the courts of this state. As this court stated in Garner Tool & Die v. Laux, 204 Neb. 717, 724, 285 N.W.2d 219, 223 (1979), citing Annot., 43 A.L.R.2d 94 (1955): Any form of postemployment restraint reduces the economic mobility of employees and limits their personal freedom to pursue a preferred course of livelihood. The employee's bargaining position is weakened because he is potentially shackled by the acquisition of alleged trade secrets; and thus, paradoxically, he is restrained, because of his increased expertise, from advancing further in the industry in which he is most productive. Moreover, society suffers because competition is diminished by slackening the dissemination of ideas, processes, and methods. If Selection Research is understood to argue that its trade secret interest resides in associated pairs of questions and listen fors, this claim must also fail for the reason that no such pair of items in the Miller instrument duplicates any pair of such items found in Selection Research items with the precision which Selection Research insists must be present to render such pairs the functional equivalent of one another. Finally, if Selection Research is understood to claim a trade secret interest in the product or process which results from combining any two, or all, of the discrete parts described earlier, this claim, too, must fail, for the evidence fails to demonstrate how the resulting product or process is unique to Selection Research. In short, the evidence fails to establish that Measurement Systems misappropriated anything that is unique to Selection Research.