A noncompete entered into as part of a settlement agreement to end litigation between an employer and former employee receives more latitude than a traditional noncompete signed before or during the employment period. 

A recent opinion out of the Eastern District of Virginia states that “unusual circumstances” must be shown to grant a party expedited discovery.

The Fourth Circuit has held that a trade secret may be composed of publicly-available information if the method by which that information is compiled is not generally known. Processes that are publicly known can become trade secrets when combined into a source code and the manner and sequence of the processes is unique and unknown to the public. 

Statements made in a press release, if based on attorney work product information, may waive work product as to the subject matter of the statements. The case discussed below serves as another warning to companies in litigation to carefully monitor the process of drafting press releases and which statements to include in them.

Web company alleges that a competitor used web robots to copy and steal its intellectual property; and it files suit in the U.S. District for the Eastern District of Virginia.

A Virginia Circuit Court answers the question of whether "a manager of an LLC [should] be able to hold the entity hostage when it is the bad acts of that manager that the LLC seeks to redress" in a case where the LLC wants to sue the member, but the operating agreement requires unanimous consent to sue the member.

The news lately is peppered by the federal governments' (lack of?) regulation of businesses, but how do state statutes and the common law regulate businesses? That is the question addressed in the article The Use of State Statutes and Common Law Tort Theories to Regulate Business Conduct which can be found here.

In a newly released opinion, the Virginia Supreme Court reaffirmed the Virginia rule that a fraud claim cannot be based upon one contracting party's false statements to another contracting party in absence of an independent common law duty. The opinion can be found here. This rule is designed to prevent ordinary breach of contract claims from turning into tort claims. The facts in the new case illustrate the principle neatly.