Jawbone Accuses Fitbit of Stealing Information by Hiring Workers Away

> One now-former employee, Ana Rosario, was hired by Fitbit as a user experience researcher around April 16 but did not disclose that she planned to leave Jawbone until April 22, the complaint said. On April 20, according to the complaint, Ms. Rosario held a meeting with Jawbone’s senior director of product management to discuss the company’s future plans and then downloaded what the company said was a “playbook” outlining its future products.

One could see how this sort of thing might have crossed a line. Perhaps Fitbit had no idea this was going on, or perhaps they hired people and implicitly or explicitly had them go in and get specific documents and information before leaving.

One of the things about civil litigation is that sort of thing can be revealed in discovery, via looking at internal emails, memos, and so on.

So Fitbit targeted Jawbone as a source of engineering and product development talent. That seems like fair play to me and anything less would seem oddly uncompetitive.

Some of those ex-employees broke the confidence and policies of Jawbone while employed there. That's the issue; Jawbone needs to address that with the individuals.

If they want an injunction preventing Fitbit from using the literal documents in question, or the specific confidential information about product roadmaps in the employees' heads, that seems appropriate, but it's unclear how you'd enforce it.

Fitbit is going to develop features in their hardware and software that compete in the market. Inevitably, some of those same features will have been on Jawbone's roadmap. The fact they get developed isn't proof to me that it was stolen.

1. The "optics" in this type of situation can be terrible; that can matter a lot in court. Non-technical judges and/or jurors won't understand the engineering details. They will understand it when the former employer's lawyer says, "Ladies and gentlemen, we will show that [the former employee] is a liar, a sneak, and a thief."

2. It's not at all unheard of for lawsuits to come out of the woodwork as an IPO approaches. And surely these lawsuits are all brought from the purest of motives; certainly no right-thinking company would ever try to intentionally disrupt its competitor's IPO, right?

3. Flashback: In the early 1990s, Computer Associates successfully sued a small company, Altai, for misappropriation of trade secrets. An Altai executive, who was a CA alumnus, recruited a CA product manager to work on an Altai product that competed with a CA product.

Unbeknownst to Altai, the former CA product manager brought CA code with him when he moved over. Altai had to rip out and replace the code and pay $364,000 in damages for infringement. (This was also a major scope-of-copyright-protection case concerning the replacement code.) [1] [2]

The dispute cost Altai a lot of money and, perhaps more importantly, time and reputation capital.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Associates_Internation....

[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=639604498871411... -- see especially the part with the heading Dramatis personae.

I feel like in these cases where one startup sues a rival for stealing trade secrets that it means neither has anything worth stealing.

It's as if the CA anti-solicitation scandal never happened. Let's increase the fines for companies who are trying to own their employees by 100x.

What a shit headline. This isn't about stealing talent, it's about stealing property. The whole issue is here:

"hiring Jawbone employees who improperly downloaded sensitive materials shortly before leaving."

"During her exit interviews, Ms. Rosario initially denied taking confidential information, but she later acknowledged downloading its “Market Trends & Opportunities” presentation, the complaint said."

Go after the individual employees for stealing from you, not fitbit for hiring them.

Url changed from http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/27/jawbone-sues-fitbit-for-st..., which points to this.

Is it legal in some countries to leave your job for the competition? I thought that's commonly outlawed in most countries.

Stealing planning documents is another thing but I am quite surprised that it's okay to leave your company and work for the competition two days later.