Injunctions


Joe has extensive experience in equity injunction and preliminary injunction practice.  Joe has represented many plaintiffs and defendants in courts all over the United States involving requests for preliminary injunctions relating to intellectual property, non-competition agreements, trade secrets and other matters.  It has been said that the request for a preliminary injunction is tantamount to seeking judgment and execution before trial.  The case is front-loaded and expedited.  Immediate action is required to protect or defend your legal rights.  Joe knows the drill.  Now, let Joe help you navigate the legal rollercoaster related to injunctive relief.
For instance, in International Settlement Design, Inc. v. Hickey, 25 Pa. D&C 4th 506 (Allegheny County 1995), Joe defended two individuals who started their own business against claims from their former employer for claims including, breach of a non-compete agreements, theft of trade secrets and commercial disparagement.  Joe beat the odds and busted the covenants not to compete convincing the court to rule that the agreements were so grossly overly broad that they should not be enforced at all and got that order affirmed on appeal.  In addition, the court agreed with Joe’s argument that the customer lists and other information at issue were not trade secrets.  Most recently, in Nucor Corporation v. Bell and SeverCorr, LLC, 482 F. Supp. 2d 714 (D.S.C. 2007), Joe represented an individual and his new employer against a panoply of claims including breach of a non-disclosure and non-solicitation agreement the individual signed years after he commenced employment, theft of trade secrets and other claims.  Joe was successful in gaining an early dismissal of the breach of non-disclosure and non-solicitation agreement for lack of consideration.
In another episode of the Nucor litigation, Joe helped defend an individual accused of wiping allegedly relevant data from a computer. After a Daubert hearing on the qualifications of the parties’ computer forensics experts, the court excluded testimony of the opposing expert that a particular program to wipe data had been downloaded, installed, and used on Joe’s client’s laptop computer. Although the laptop had large blocks of “zeros” that the expert theorized could have been created by use of a secure delete function of the program, the court found that the version of the program placed on the laptop did not have a secure delete function. Nucor Corp. v. Bell, 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 86328 (D.S.C. Jan. 11, 2008).
Another one of Joe’s reported commercial cases includes, Latuszewski v. VALIC Financial Advisors, Inc., 2005 WL 1367809 (3rd. Cir. 2005), where Joe represented the former employer and convinced the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals to affirm the District Court’s grant of a preliminary injunction that protected the unauthorized disclosure and use of the former employer’s trade secrets and Arnold v. Pennsylvania, Dept. of Transp., 477 F.3d 105 (3rd Cir., 2007), Joe helped a private construction company beat back a media outlet’s attempt to pierce a court ordered confidentiality agreement to attempt exploit confidential information disclosed in court proceedings.
While not a reported case, Joe represented the founding partners of Superior Well Services, Inc. (“SWSI”) when they broke from the notorious Haliburton and were sued by Haliburton in federal court in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent them from starting their own new company that is now publicly traded on the NASDAQ as SWSI.