Under Florida law accords litigants with two main avenues for recovery of damages in cases of deception or fraud. One option is via the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act (commonly referred to as FDUPTA), which allows recovery of actual damages plus the legal expense associated with the successful…
Businesses sometimes suffer from disloyal employees who misappropriate trade secrets and confidential information, diverting them to competitors. Such unfair competition can be addressed through contractual claims based on non-compete agreements as well as claims for trade secret misappropriation. Because Florida’s restrictive covenant statute, Florida Statutes Section 542.335, provides strong remedies…
Federal law prohibits trademark infringement, which typically is enforced via the Lanham Act. The Lanham Act, at 15 U.S.C. section 1127, defines a trademark as “any word, name, symbol, or device, or any combination thereof,” which is used by a person to “identify and distinguish his or her goods…from those…
Under Florida’s version of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, Florida Statutes Section 688.002(b)(4), a “trade secret” means information, including a formula, pattern, program, device, method, technique, or process that: (a) Derives independent economic value, actual or potential, from not being generally known to, and not being readily ascertainable by proper…
In Florida, it is common for shopping centers to have leases with “exclusivity covenants” allowing a commercial business the exclusive right to operate its type of business in the shopping center. For example, a shopping center may have a grocery store as an anchor tenant, i.e., a tenant that provides…
Much of non-compete agreement litigation centers on the availability of obtaining a preliminary injunction barring competition. As the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit explained in United States v. Lambert, 695 F.2d 536 (11th Cir. 1983), a preliminary injunction is “an extraordinary and drastic remedy” that is…
Under Florida’s non-compete statute, Florida Statutes Section 542.335(1)(b), “[t]he person seeking enforcement of a restrictive covenant shall plead and prove the existence of one or more legitimate business interests justifying the restrictive covenant.” The term “legitimate business interest” includes trade secrets (as defined in Florida Statutes Section 688.002(4)) and “valuable…
Under the Federal Defend Trade Secrets Act as well as the Uniform Trade Secret Act adopted by many states, unauthorized use of trade secret information and unauthorized acquisition or disclosure of trade secret information may constitute misappropriation. The legal concept of “misappropriation” includes not only the wholesale pirating of an…
Just because parties sign two separate documents or contracts does not mean Florida law actually views these contracts separately. This is significant because rights and liabilities arising from one document may extend to the other. Many business litigation cases in Florida deal with business sales involving actions on a promissory…
In business litigation cases, parties frequently plead the affirmative defense of “mitigation of damages.” Although commonly referred to as the “duty” to mitigate damages, Florida courts instead refer to this as the doctrine of unavoidable consequences. This legal doctrine prevents a party from recovering those damages inflicted by a wrongdoer…