Breaking News: $919 Million Verdict for DuPont in Trade Secret Theft and eDiscovery Sanctions Case
by Philip Favro on September 15th, 2011
A federal jury returned a stunning, $919 million verdict yesterday for DuPont in a trade secret theft case. In E.I. du Pont de Nemours v. Kolon Industries, the verdict was the culmination of a two-and-a-half year battle that DuPont waged against Kolon Industries to prove that Kolon had misappropriated key aspects of its formula for Kevlar®.
The court delivered a decisive blow shortly before trial when it found that Kolon had destroyed emails and other electronically stored information linking it to the trade secret theft. The sanction for that spoliation was an instruction to the jury that Kolon executives and employees had deleted key evidence after the company’s preservation duty was triggered.
The verdict against Kolon is just the beginning of its problems. DuPont will now request over $50 million in punitive damages from Kolon, another $30 million for reimbursement of its attorney fees and a permanent injunction forbidding Kolon from using the stolen trade secrets. Not surprisingly, Kolon’s stock dropped 15% after news of the verdict reached the markets today.
The eDiscovery sanctions order and corresponding verdict make it clear that organizations should invest the time and effort to properly prepare for litigation and discovery. As we argued in our previous post on the DuPont case, having the right tools in place could have prevented much of the spoliation – and the resulting instruction to the jury – that occurred in the DuPont case.
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September 21st, 2011 at 5:46 am
[...] for DuPont in Trade Secret Theft and eDiscovery Sanctions Case - http://tinyurl.com/3em3n7j (Philip [...]
September 22nd, 2011 at 3:53 pm
[...] recent cases and others confirm the correlation between retention and preservation. Simply put, proactive retention leads to better preservation [...]
September 24th, 2011 at 8:20 am
[...] for DuPont in Trade Secret Theft and eDiscovery Sanctions Case - http://tinyurl.com/3em3n7j (Philip [...]
October 25th, 2011 at 11:46 am
[...] for groups that fail to account for how they store, manage and discover their information. The $919 million verdict rendered in the E.I. du Pont de Nemours v. Kolon Industries case is paradigmatic of this trend. [...]
May 7th, 2012 at 10:00 am
[...] A cloud service provider should therefore enable automated legal hold acknowledgements. Such technology will allow custodians to be promptly and properly notified of litigation and thereby retain information that might otherwise have been discarded. Inadequate litigation hold technology leaves organizations vulnerable to data loss and court punishment. [...]
November 2nd, 2012 at 7:05 am
[...] issue, with the DuPont v. Kolon Industries litigation foremost among them. In the DuPont case, a $919 million verdict and 20 year product injunction largely stemmed from the defendant’s inability to prevent the [...]