AirFacts, Inc. v. De Amezaga

Diego de Amezaga (defendant) worked for AirFacts Inc. (plaintiff) from 2008 until 2015. AirFacts required all employees to sign confidentiality agreements and installed monitoring software on their computers. On his last day, de Amezaga emailed two documents to his personal account relating to AirFacts’ planned proration software product (the proration documents). De Amezaga testified that he sent the proration documents to himself only so he could answer questions from his supervisors after his departure. After resigning, he never accessed the documents, and no one at AirFacts requested his assistance with the proration project. Prior to the end of his employment, AirFacts had allowed a few employees to set up Lucidchart accounts to access company documents remotely. About a month after leaving AirFacts, de Amezaga used his AirFacts credentials to access Lucidchart and downloaded two flowcharts displaying ticket-price rules derived from the Airline Tariff Publishing Company (ATPCO) (the flowcharts). Although the ATPCO data was publicly available, de Amezaga had spent months compiling and organizing the information, adding his own insights, and producing a format that made auditing faster and more efficient. AirFacts filed suit against de Amezaga, alleging misappropriation of trade secrets under the Maryland Uniform Trade Secrets Act (MUTSA). The district court ruled for de Amezaga, finding that the flowcharts were not trade secrets because they summarized publicly available data and were widely available to AirFacts employees, and that although the proration documents were trade secrets, they had not been misappropriated because de Amezaga accessed them with authorization and did not use or disclose them after his resignation. AirFacts appealed.