On December 16, 2020, a judge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed a U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California decision in the matter of Attia et al v. Google LLC et. al, in which the Ninth Circuit found that Google had misappropriated Eli Attia’s trade secrets related to “a new architecture technology called Engineered Architecture (EA).”
The district court originally dismissed Attia’s claims of trade secret misappropriation under the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA), in part due to the fact that the alleged misuse occurred in 2012, which predated the DTSA’s enactment in 2016. However, the Ninth Circuit reversed the ruling, finding that claims can be brought against misconduct that predated the enactment of the DTSA “so long as the misappropriation continued until after the enactment.”