On April 8, 2020, a judge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) vacated the summary judgment entered on behalf of Acer by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, and remanded the case to state court.
The trade secret misappropriation dispute began in October 2014, when Intellisoft alleged that Acer had disclosed the technology company’s trade secrets in a power management system patent for personal computers. Acer removed the case to district court after issuing a patent inventorship counterclaim, but CAFC ruled that using a patent to support trade secret misappropriation allegations does not “create a substantial issue of patent law” requiring district court original jurisdiction.
