Practice Areas: Intellectual Property Law

Justin Ledden, Civil Litigation Attorney

Intellectual property law encompasses a wide variety of fields, including patent, trademark, copyright, and trade secrets law. Ledden Law Office has focused on trademark and trade secrets litigation.

Trademark litigation often involves claims for trademark infringement, whereby the parties involved dispute whether the alleged mark is, under Federal or state law, sufficiently similar to the original mark. A probability of customer confusion analysis is utilized here. Trademark dilution, where parties argue over whether the alleged “diluter” weakens a famous mark’s ability to distinguish itself in the marketplace, is also sometimes at issue.

Trade secrets are defined by the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, adopted in California and in most other states as a legal framework providing trade secret protection as:

information, including a formula, pattern, compilation, program, device, method, technique, or process,
that derives independent economic value, actual or potential, from not being generally known to or readily ascertainable through appropriate means by other persons who might obtain economic value from its disclosure or use; and
is the subject of efforts that are reasonable under the circumstances to maintain its secrecy

Trade secret litigation typically involves an employee or former employee providing a competitor with one or more pieces of the valuable information described above. Non-disclosure, non-solicitation, and non-competition agreements are important here, among other types of documentation, and it is important that these documents are drafted in a manner that provides companies with trade secret protection. As part of its business transactions practice, Ledden Law Office drafts and reviews agreements with the protection of your valuable trade secrets in mind.