McClain v. State

Frank McClain (plaintiff) was employed by Didrickson Associates, Inc. to test, certify, and repair the circuit boards, referred to as cards, used in General Electric gas turbines. Didrickson compiled and maintained an extensive library of circuit board diagrams, referred to as backsheets. The backsheets were physical, paper diagrams that were kept in locked file cabinets in a secured building. General Electric, the original creator of the backsheets, had previously released all the backsheets in Didrickson’s library into the public domain. During his employment, McClain created summaries of the backsheets for easy reference, which he referred to as set-up sheets. McClain’s set-up sheets were written directly onto the relevant backsheets. McClain eventually left Didrickson and started his own business. When he left, McClain took 100 of the backsheets containing McClain’s set-up sheets. McClain had not signed a confidentiality agreement, a noncompete agreement, or a work-product-ownership assignment contract with Didrickson. Regardless, upon request, McClain returned the 100 annotated backsheets to Didrickson. The State of Texas (defendant) charged McClain with theft of trade secrets, arguing that (1) the backsheets were trade secrets because they contained valuable, technical information; (2) even if the backsheets were not trade secrets, McClain’s set-up sheets were trade secrets; and (3) Didrickson owned McClain’s set-up sheets because McClain created them during his employment. After a jury trial, McClain was convicted and sentenced to jail. McClain appealed, arguing that the trial court improperly defined trade-secret ownership.