[staticautomatic]

Here's 4 from the first page of results on WestLaw:

- Ahern Rentals, 59 F.4th 948 (2023)

- Wilmington Star-News, 125 N.C. App. 174 (1997)

- Ingram, 260 Md. App. 122 (2023)

- Intertek Testing Servs., 443 F. Supp. 3d 303 (2020)

[CPLX]

The first one is obviously distinguishable. It’s an action against competitors.

I’ll save myself the trouble of doing your research for you and ask if any of these involved a fact pattern where customers of a service sharing price info with each other is considered a trade secret.

Here’s a hint: if I am the customer and I am describing something that I myself did, specifically the outcome of a business decision I made on how much to pay, that’s not someone else’s trade secret.

[staticautomatic]

A customer can misappropriate a vendor’s trade secret and price lists can be trade secrets. As a general matter these propositions easily fall within the relevant laws (UTSA, DTSA, NY common law) and there are plenty of cases around the country supporting that. If you have a different opinion, all I can say is that I believe you’d find out in court that you’re wrong.

[CPLX]

Right but something that I do isn’t your secret. It can’t be in an arms length customer/vendor relationship.

You can make an argument that internal documents of a vendor are trade secrets, maybe. But you can’t say that a piece of information in the record of MY company, namely how much I decided to pay for their software, is a trade secret that belongs to someone else.

You’re learning how to be a lawyer quickly. It’s really common for attorneys to cite cases where the fact pattern doesn’t line up at all and hope nobody reads them. But if you are sure there is good precedent for this specific point then post it. I doubt that’s the case for the obvious reasons I outlined above.

[staticautomatic]

Don’t patronize me.

You’re basically arguing that the act of purchasing renders the NDA void. Good luck with that.

[CPLX]

Have you ever read an NDA? They usually go something like this:

For purposes of this Agreement, "Confidential Information" shall include any information, material, data, or know-how, including trade secrets and proprietary information, that is not generally known to the public and that is disclosed, either written or orally, to be or appears to a reasonable person to be proprietary or confidential.

The price that my company paid to purchase someone else's software was not "disclosed" to me. I created the information myself, when I made the decision to purchase it. The company didn't convey, transmit, or pass the information to me. My act of deciding to purchase the software created the information, which did not exist prior to my purchase decision, and it's information about me and my company's actions and by definition can't be someone else's proprietary data.

[spxneo]

looking at the third one it does seem like pricing did fall under confidential data but that was after the database with those info was directly accessed

> Trial court did not err in finding the plaintiff took reasonable steps under the circumstances to maintain the secrecy of its trade secrets, including internal customer and pricing information, as required by MUTSA, CL § 11-1201(e)(2), where the plaintiff restricted access to the information on a company database; an employee handbook prohibited employees from removing sensitive categories of information

This seems very different from me getting a quote from you and then at a bar saying yeah XYZ enterprise plan costs $42,000/year

[staticautomatic]

If the price list is provided under NDA, that could certainly be a reasonable effort to maintain its secrecy. It should be unsurprising that NDAs are canonical examples of such efforts. The fact that any given case may be distinguishable on some issue from our hypothetical fact pattern doesn’t mean much.