Court Opinion

ID: 9495769
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:09:55.32655+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:57:11.293749
License: Public Domain

HILL, Circuit Judge,

concurring.

I concur in that part of the panel opinion affirming the judgment of the district court. I do not join in the discussion of the burdens of proof, persuasion and production of evidence on the issue of the defendant’s “use” of plaintiffs trade secret and the district court’s instruction to the jury in this regard. I do not because I believe that this discussion is unnecessary.
The judge instructed the jury that there are four essential elements of a trade secret claim: first, that the plaintiff had a trade secret; second, that he communicated this secret to the defendant in confidence and the defendant was not entitled to use it without his permission; third, that the defendant did use the secret without permission; and fourth, that the plaintiff suffered damage as the result.
In this case, the jury was asked a series of interrogatories corresponding to these elements. It answered “No” to the following interrogatory:
Do you find that Plaintiff has proven by a preponderance of the evidence that he owned a trade secret which was disclosed in confidence to Defendant and which Defendant was not entitled to use or disclose without Plaintiffs permission?
In so doing, the jury closed the door on plaintiffs misappropriation of trade secret claim. No further examination of the claim was necessary. The plaintiff failed to prove the first element of his claim— that he had a trade secret which he disclosed to the defendant.
The panel opinion, however, examines a different element of plaintiffs claim— whether the defendant misappropriated plaintiffs trade secret by actually using it in developing its own product. Since the jury found there was no trade secret communicated to the defendant, I do not see the necessity of discussing whether the defendant wrongfully used the non-existent trade secret communicated to it.
The panel explains in footnote 2 why it felt compelled to undertake this discussion. The panel believes that the district court’s instruction as to the defense of “independent development” of the defendant’s product could have influenced the jury’s answer to interrogatory # 2 because that interrogatory inquired as to the defendant’s entitlement to use plaintiffs secret (asking whether the defendant was “entitled to use the secret”). The panel believes that this construction of the interrogatory “conflates” the elements of the existence and communication of the trade secret with the wrongful use of the trade secret in a way which does not allow us to know exactly what the jury found when it answered “no” to this question.
I believe, however, that the issues of independent development and use of the plaintiffs trade secret are mutually exclusive. If the defendant developed a product *575independently, it did not use the plaintiffs trade secret. If the defendant used the plaintiffs trade secret, then it did not independently develop its own product. Therefore, the instruction as to independent development, whether correct or not, would have had no effect whatsoever on the issue of use vel non.
So, in my view, the case is simple. The jury found the very first criterion for a trade secret claim not to exist. The case is over. I concur in the judgment affirming.