ST. LOUIS – A federal judge has ordered a company to produce records dating back a decade in a misappropriation of trade secrets case.
District Judge Ronnie L. White granted defendant Kane International Corp.'s motion to compel US Polymers-Accurez LLC to provide financial documents dating back 10 years on June 11.
The ruling states Kane initially sought documents dating to 1995 and US Polymers-Accurez alleged that the defendant’s motion to compel was too broad and burdensome.
"The court agrees that USPA has put its financial condition at issue based upon its claim that it lost money due to Kane's misappropriation of trade secrets," White wrote. "...The court, however, agrees that discovery requests seeking documents dating back from 1995 are overbroad and unduly burdensome. Accordingly, the court orders USPA to produce the requested documents, dating back 10 years from the date of this order."
Kane sought balance sheets, cash flow statements, income statements, profit and loss statements, general ledgers, pro forma financial statements, audited financial statements, unaudited financial statements, compiled financial statements, internal financial statements, valuations, quality of earnings reports, sales by customer and product and other financial documents and analysis from 1997 to the present.
US Polymers-Accurez alleged that the defendant had never identified a specific list of documents needed to perform its analysis for an effective mediation and that from the documents already produced, the defendant can determine the plaintiff’s lost gross revenue and gross profits, lost gross revenue from raw material pricing, and the defendant’s own alleged lost profits from January 2017 to present.
The ruling states Kane's response was that the documents that the plaintiff produced are not as the plaintiff says they are and that the only paperwork produced to it was a 900-page PDF that was "sorted in a manner that rendered it useless."
Kane alleged that the plaintiff is asserting $30 million in damages for actual loss caused by the alleged misappropriation of the plaintiff’s trade secrets, as well as actual and consequential damages caused by employees’ alleged breach of fiduciary duty.
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri case number 4:17-CV-02371