Technology litigation: counsel who reads the code.

Technology disputes are won or lost on technical facts — how a system was architected, what the code actually does, whether a claimed trade secret was really secret, whether the defendant's product is actually "substantially similar" to the plaintiff's. Most litigators rely entirely on expert witnesses to translate the technology for them. We don't.

Our principal holds a master's degree in computer science and has testified as an expert witness in software-engineering disputes. We have audited millions of lines of production code in the context of acquisitions and litigation. When we evaluate a trade-secret claim, a software-licensing dispute, or a CFAA allegation, we read the underlying technical evidence ourselves — which affects case strategy, deposition preparation, and the arguments we bring to court.

We represent both plaintiffs and defendants across the full range of technology disputes, and we pursue arbitration and mediation where the business case for settlement is stronger than protracted litigation.

Trade-secret litigation is now governed by two parallel bodies of law: the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act (2016) and the state Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA), adopted in some form by 48 states. The DTSA allows claims in federal court without diversity jurisdiction, ex parte seizure orders for cases involving imminent destruction of evidence, and injunctive relief plus exemplary damages up to 2× actual damages for willful misappropriation.

The threshold issue in most trade-secret cases is whether the claimed secret actually qualifies — information must derive independent economic value from not being generally known, and the owner must have taken reasonable measures to keep it secret. In software disputes, this often turns on access controls, NDAs, employee onboarding procedures, and whether the alleged secret was disclosed in public documentation, patents, or open source. We analyze both the strength of the trade-secret claim and the strength of the misappropriation theory before recommending litigation.

• Source code and algorithm protection: documenting and enforcing trade-secret status for proprietary trading strategies, ML model architectures, and software source code — including the critical intersection with employment agreements, invention-assignment clauses, and contractor IP ownership.
• Employee departure and competitive-threat response: immediate legal response when a key employee departs to a competitor — preservation letters, forensic-investigation support, and injunctive relief motions under the DTSA and applicable state law.
• Non-compete and NDA enforcement: California prohibits non-competes for employees under Bus. & Prof. Code § 16600 (with very limited exceptions); other states are more permissive. We advise on what is actually enforceable before you rely on a clause that won't hold up.

The CFAA is the primary federal statute for unauthorized computer-access claims. It covers both criminal prosecution and civil suits, with civil liability available to any person who suffers damage or loss exceeding $5,000 in any one-year period from a violation. The statute prohibits accessing a computer "without authorization" or "exceeding authorized access" — a distinction the Supreme Court narrowed significantly in Van Buren v. United States, 593 U.S. 374 (2021).

• Offensive CFAA claims: civil actions against former employees who copied data before departure, competitors who accessed your systems without authorization, or scrapers violating platform terms of service (a contested area post-Van Buren and hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn).
• CFAA defense: representing defendants in civil and criminal CFAA matters — particularly security researchers, former employees, and software developers whose access patterns are alleged to be unauthorized.
• Data-breach liability: CFAA intersects with state breach-notification laws (CCPA, Texas Identity Theft Enforcement and Protection Act) and creates both regulatory exposure and private litigation risk following unauthorized system access.

Patent Infringement

Patent infringement claims under 35 U.S.C. § 271 arise when a product or process practices each limitation of a valid patent claim. Software-patent litigation involves claim construction disputes (what the patent actually covers), invalidity arguments under § 102 (anticipation) and § 103 (obviousness), and increasingly, patent eligibility challenges under § 101 following Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int'l, 573 U.S. 208 (2014). Damages under § 284 are "in no event less than a reasonable royalty" — but lost-profits and price-erosion theories can produce substantially higher awards when the patent owner can establish market position.

Copyright and the DMCA

Copyright infringement in software contexts — copying source code, training-data disputes, API structure copying, and UI/UX reproduction — is governed by 17 U.S.C. § 501. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 1201 et seq.) adds anti-circumvention liability for bypassing technological protection measures, which has become increasingly relevant as platforms use access controls to restrict competitors and researchers. We handle DMCA takedown and counter-notice procedures, § 512 safe-harbor analysis for platforms, and both offensive and defensive copyright litigation for software companies.

• Software-licensing disputes: breach of SaaS agreements, open-source license compliance (GPL/AGPL copyleft triggers, MIT/Apache compatibility), and enterprise-license scope disputes — areas where the legal analysis requires understanding what the software actually does.
• AI training-data and model-output disputes: the current wave of litigation over whether training LLMs on copyrighted text constitutes infringement, and what fair-use analysis applies — an active and rapidly evolving area of law.
• Expert-witness services: technical expert testimony on software architecture, source-code similarity, industry standards of care, and the feasibility of claimed technical features — in litigation and arbitration proceedings.