Baxter Revisited For Misappropriation Claim

So, while the Baxter court concluded that a tortious interference claim could not survive summary judgement under the facts set forth in our previous post, those same facts supported the survival of the misappropriation claim.

Determining whether HQ had potentially misappropriated Baxter's trade secrets under New Jersey's Trade Secrets Act required a very different analysis from the tortious interference claim considered by the Court. The seminal issue on the misappropriation claim was whether HQ knew or had reason to know that the employee obtained trade secrets by improper means.

Analyzing this question, the Court noted that HQ knew that: i) the employee was involved in the development of a similar patent while he was employed by Baxter and ii) HQ had no development effort with that product prior to the hiring of Baxter's former employee. Based on those facts, HQ conceivably had "reason to know" that the employee may have accessed (and relied upon) trade-secret