Here’s a trade secret case close to home involving Group14 Technologies, a Seattle-based battery company. I posted a couple cases in the past month with similar fact patterns:
Initiate Partnership –> Sign NDA –> Share trade secrets –> Relationship goes south –> Plaintiff claims their trade secrets are showing up in the Defendant patent applications!!
The key learnings from this and similar cases are #1) have the trade secrets well defined internally before it is shared externally and #2) make it crystal clear to the partner that you are treating the information as a trade secret.