Brett J. Williamson

Williamson started out as a general commercial litigator but has spent the last two decades exclusively handling intellectual property cases.

“It’s been a really remarkable time to be an IP litigator ... because there’s been so many changes,” Williamson said. “In traditional corporate espionage, before electronic information, trade secrets cases were, in many ways, equivalent to a normal theft case because you were usually talking about physical documents or prototypes,” he said.

In the modern era, with documents, formulas and other manifestations of trade secrets being stored electronically, “it’s very, very hard to know... exactly what’s been taken and what the vulnerabilities are,” Williamson explained.

In these cases, many things are unknown, he said. It’s hard to pinpoint how far “the misappropriation goes, how many former employees were involved [and] what other unfair activities were being planned by the defendant, [so] you never really, fully find out how badly your property ... has been misappropriated,” he said.

In a recent case, Williamson served as lead counsel for Endo International plc and its subsidiary, Par Pharmaceutical.

The case involved a number of executives and other management and technical personnel who left Par Pharmaceutical between 2014 and 2017, Williamson said.

“Over that period of time, the two most senior people who left Par formed a competing company called QuVa Pharma,” Williamson said.

The departures had been gradual, Williamson said, so it wasn’t until the summer of 2017 that Par Pharmaceutical suspected there may have been misappropriation relating to “a number of trade secrets related to its sterile pharmaceutical process.”

After learning that QuVa Pharma Inc. planned to launch a competing product, Williamson filed a misappropriation suit on behalf of Endo. He obtained expedited discovery and moved for a preliminary injunction.

“The court allowed for an expedited limited discovery period,” Williamson said, and during that time, Par Pharmaceutical “discovered a lot more evidence.”

Discovery is still ongoing, but Williamson said Par Pharmaceutical has an injunction preventing QuVa from launching the competitive product until a trial on the merits is held. Par Pharmaceutical, Inc. et al. v. QuVa Pharma, Inc. et al., 3:17-cv-06115-BRM-DEA (D. N.J., filed Aug. 14, 2017).

— Skylar Dubelko