O’Melveny & Myers

Firm overview:

Full-service international firm O’Melveny & Myers takes a cross-disciplinary approach to trade secrets law, bridging intellectual property, labour and employment, white-collar criminal law, antitrust, and other disciplines.

The firm enforces and defends trade secrets claims in court, investigates leaks, and advises clients on evaluating and the risk of employees arriving and departing, as well as anticipate and resolve issues pre-litigation.

Known for its Silicon Valley and US West Coast origins, O’Melveny has 800 lawyers working in 13 global offices in the US, Europe (Brussels and London) and Asia (Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore and Tokyo).

The firm regularly advises on jurisdictional rules, multiple intersecting areas of law, and dynamic technologies. O’Melveny is experienced in civil trade secret litigation and criminal matters, and the interrelations between the two.

The firm’s contentious lawyers collaborate with the transactional lawyers on the trade secrets hazards in strategic M&A, investment, partnership and joint venture transactions. This includes the potential pitfalls in restrictive covenants, non-competition, non-solicitation, and non-disclosure agreements.

Team overview:

O’Melveny can draw on its practice area and jurisdiction resources—including lawyers with advanced technical degrees—to field legal teams related to each trade secrets matter. The firm’s lawyers are published authorities on unfair competition, restrictive covenants, and trade secrets misappropriation law and policy.

In the San Francisco office, David Almeling is a starting point for leading global peers in naming individuals of note. Almeling has represented clients in countless matters spanning the full range of trade secret and employee mobility issues, from advising on protection programmes to investigating alleged thefts, to litigating trade secret cases in the US and abroad.

Almeling has taught trade secrets law at Berkeley Law School for the past five years. He testified at the invitation of the US Congress on safeguarding trade secrets. His book, Trade Secret Law and Corporate Strategy, is now in its third edition. He is the current vice chair of the Sedona Conference Working Group on trade secrets and he is one of seven co-authors of the Trade Secret Case Management Judicial Guide, a 400-page treatise published by the Federal Judicial Center, the educational and research agency of the federal courts.

Darin Snyder, in the San Francisco office, engineers litigation strategies for world-leading companies involved in patent, trade secrets, and technology-intense copyright disputes.

Key matters:

David Almeling led O’Melveny teams representing:

• A life sciences company in a California state court case where former employees, and the new company they formed, misappropriated trade secrets to develop competing oligonucleotide synthesis technology (which has a wide application in genetic testing, research, and forensics) and DNA printing technology;
• A New York pharmaceutical company in a District of New Jersey trade secrets case against former employees and the company they founded. The court granted a preliminary injunction that was widely reported and that prohibited the defendants from releasing its competing drug product. The Third Circuit upheld the injunction in part, and the case was favourably settled.
• A subsidiary of a California public company, providing analogue and mixed-signal semiconductors, in a Texas state court trade secrets and breach of contract case involving power management semiconductor technology that resulted in a summary jury trial victory and a favourable post-verdict settlement.
• A healthcare management company in a District of Delaware trade secrets and noncompete case against the company’s former general manager and the competitor that hired that manager. The court granted in part the client’s motion for a preliminary injunction, and shortly after, the parties reached a favourable confidential settlement.
• Darin Snyder represented JHL Biotech, now Eden Biologics, in defending a complex bet-the-company trade secrets case against biotech giant Genentech, securing a preliminary injunction order that allowed the company to continue to operate (Genentech v JHL Biotech, et al, 2019).
• Eric Amdursky represents Oasis West, and its CEO, in a trade secrets misappropriation suit brought by the operator of the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills regarding a former employee who allegedly used trade secrets while employed by the Waldorf Hotel, also in Beverly Hills. The case was dismissed with prejudice on the pleadings on three of the four claims asserted against O’Melveny’s clients, and the motion for preliminary injunction was defeated in its entirety.

Clients:

Eden Biologics (then JHL Biotech), Oasis West.