Rick L. Richmond

It’s no secret that Richmond scored one of the biggest trade secret verdicts ever -- $940 million for his client, medical software company Epic Systems Corp.

The case was against Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., an India-based company accused of stealing confidential information regarding the healthcare software Epic licensed to Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, which Epic alleged Tata improperly used to improve Tata’s own healthcare software. Epic Systems Corp. v. Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. (W.D. Wis., filed Oct. 31, 2014).

Richmond said that, besides the direct evidence of Tata’s theft of the information, it was Tata’s destruction of evidence of what happened with the stolen information that helped him win the case when the court imposed an adverse inference instruction. “The jury was entitled to presume the information TCS stole, and then deleted, was used for improper purposes,” he explained.

Then there was the timeline of events. “There’s no question TCS was targeting the U.S. market for expansion of its healthcare software and that these trade secrets were stolen at the very time TCS needed an improved version of its software to facilitate that expansion,” Richmond said.

Richmond believes that as time goes on and technology continues to evolve, cases involving the theft of trade secrets are likely to become more frequent since it’s so much easier to steal electronic information today than something like physical blueprints in the old days. Also, Richmond explained, “trade secret law, which is state-law dependent, remains more flexible than patent law because all patent cases eventually go to the Federal Circuit and are therefore all bound by the same uniform body of appellate law.”

In addition, Richmond said, it is now easier to bring trade secrets cases in federal court since Congress passed the Defend Trade Secrets Act in 2016, which provides a federal jurisdictional basis on which trade secret cases can be fought in federal court other than diversity jurisdiction.