USA – CALIFORNIA Trends and Developments Contributed by: Aaron Nathan, Samantha Jameson and Azra Hadzimehmodovic, Tensegrity Law Group LLP
sonable particularity”, which is the discovery standard from the CUTSA. As the court explained, the district court had “ultimately relied on a California rule that does not control a federal trade-secret claim”. Id. The Ninth Circuit held that it was an abuse of discretion when the district court ordered that the case would proceed on only two of the trade secrets because the other nine had not been disclosed with “reasonable particularity”. Id. This does not appear to have been intended as a narrow holding, as the court further explained that “a DTSA trade-secret claim will rarely be dismissible as a discovery sanction in a situation like this”, and instead the question of whether there is “reasonable particularity” is one to “be resolved on summary judgment or at trial”. Id. at 1091. The central implication of Quintara is that trade secret plaintiffs filing in California have a particular advan - tage if they assert claims under the DTSA. Rather than being required to disclose detailed trade secret contentions before discovery can open as required by the CUTSA, plaintiffs under the DTSA can proceed to discovery based on a less stringent standard of disclosure. Essentially a DTSA plaintiff has to meet the pleading standard and, at least on the facts of Quintara, go some amount beyond that in early dis - covery. But the DTSA plaintiff has through discovery and until the summary judgment stage of the case to meet the statutory particular standard as part of its proof of facts. Worldwide Damages Another developing issue is the application of world - wide damages for misappropriation of trade secrets under the DTSA that occur only in part in the United States. In Motorola Solutions , the Seventh Circuit held that “the DTSA rebuts the presumption against extra - territoriality” and “is satisfied if ‘an act in furtherance of the offense [misappropriation of a trade secret] was committed in the United States’”. Motorola Sols., Inc. v Hytera Commc’ns Corp. Ltd. , 108 F.4th 458, 483 (7th Cir. 2024) (Cert. Denied 145 S. Ct. 1182 (2025)). The court explained that “unlike copyright’s predicate- act doctrine for extraterritorial application, [the DTSA] does not require a completed act of domestic misap - propriation, nor does it impose a causation require - ment”. Id. at 487. The court concluded, “[s]o long as an act in furtherance of the offense was committed in
the United States,... then all damages caused by the offense are recoverable..., wherever in the world the rest of the underlying conduct occurred”. Id. at 487-88 (internal quotation marks omitted). Given the Supreme Court’s denial of certiorari, courts sitting in California can be expected to look to this ruling, and at least one has done so. A court in the Northern District of California wrote: “The extraterrito - rial reach of the Defend Trade Secrets Act is broader than that of the Copyright Act, because the Defend Trade Secrets Act ‘does not require a completed act of domestic misappropriation, nor does it impose a specific causation requirement’”. Beijing Meishe Network Tech. Co. v TikTok Inc. , No. 23-cv-06012- SI, 2025 LX 353142, at *58 (N.D. Cal. Sep. 2, 2025) (quoting Motorola Sols., 108 F.4th at 486). In this case, the individual that was the “alleged source of improper acquisition” “lived and worked in China”, and so the Plaintiff relied on acts of further distribu - tion of the application that allegedly improperly used the trade secrets in the United States to meet the “act in furtherance” requirement for extraterritorial appli - cation of DTSA based on “U.S.-based employees work with Google and Apple for distribution of the TikTok application in those companies’ respective app stores” and “defendants develop[ing] the ‘video edit - ing functionality’ of TikTok and other allegedly infring - ing apps in China and in ByteDance, Inc.’s Mountain View, California office”. Id. at *58-59. While the court denied plaintiff’s motion seeking summary judgment that it was entitled to extraterritorial damages, it also rejected the defendants’ argument that “domestic acts of misappropriation that occur as a result of or in parallel with foreign acts are not ‘act[s] in furtherance of the offense’”. Id. at *59-60. The court concluded that “Defendants’ argument carries more weight in the copyright context but reads too much into the law in the trade secret context – at least according to the Seventh Circuit”. Id. at *59. As illustrated by the TikTok case, the continuing via - bility of extraterritorial damages for claims of trade secret misappropriation under DTSA without need - ing to show that the complete act of misappropriation took place in the United States provides an obvious further incentive for trade secret plaintiffs in California to include DTSA claims.
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