Dumbo Moving & Storage, Inc. v. Piece of Cake Moving & Storage LLC

Background

Dumbo alleged that Piece of Cake Moving & Storage LLC, Simply Moving LLC, Simply Moving Storage LLC, Stefan Marcali, Vojin Popovic, and Volodymyr Plokhykh improperly reproduced and misappropriated Dumbo’s trade secrets. The alleged trade secrets concern Dumbo’s digital management software for coordinating customer orders and fulfillment, including scheduling, dispatching, tracking moves, processing payments, and generating guaranteed price quotes.

The court had previously allowed certain copyright-infringement and trade-secret claims to proceed. During discovery, Defendants asked Dumbo to identify each alleged trade secret with enough detail to distinguish it from publicly known information and to explain the economic value of each secret. Dumbo provided a schedule listing twelve alleged trade secrets, with narrative descriptions, screenshots, and references to directories and files in its software. Dumbo later amended its responses but did not add more detail to the narrative descriptions.

At the time of the motion, the parties had exchanged interrogatories and responses but had not produced documents or exchanged source code. Defendants argued that Dumbo’s descriptions focused on software functions rather than the specific mechanics that made the software protectable, and that Dumbo had not shown how its alleged secrets differed from publicly available information. Dumbo argued that further detail could be developed after the parties exchanged source code.

Motion to Compel

Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37, a party may ask the court to order another party to provide a missing, evasive, or incomplete discovery response. The court explained that a trade-secret plaintiff must identify its alleged secrets with “reasonable particularity”—enough information to notify the defendant about the nature of the claims and allow the defendant to determine what discovery is relevant. The level of detail required can vary with the facts and the stage of discovery.

The court held that Dumbo had met that standard at this stage. It relied on the combination of Dumbo’s descriptions of twelve alleged secrets, illustrative screenshots, and specific source-code references. Because Dumbo had not yet produced the software and the parties had not exchanged source code, the court found that requiring a detailed, line-by-line explanation of how each feature worked and differed from generally known information was premature.

The court also rejected Defendants’ argument that Dumbo had to prove the uniqueness and economic value of the alleged trade secrets at this point. The court stated that Dumbo would ultimately bear the burden of proving that its alleged secrets were not generally known and had specific economic value, but that the identification requirement should not be used to decide the ultimate merits before document discovery. The court further noted that a trade secret can consist of a unique combination of components even when individual components are publicly available.

The court therefore denied Defendants’ motion to compel without prejudice and directed the parties to exchange their source code. It stated that Defendants could later seek further refinement if they could show that Dumbo had improperly expanded its trade-secret identification or that the source-code references were still insufficient.

Alternative Motion for Partial Summary Judgment

Defendants alternatively sought partial summary judgment, which is a decision without a trial when the required facts are undisputed, arguing that Dumbo’s trade-secret claims should be dismissed if Dumbo continued to provide insufficient detail. The court noted that Defendants had not followed the court’s required procedure for requesting a summary-judgment pre-motion conference. Independently, because the court found Dumbo’s identification sufficient at this stage, it denied Defendants’ motion for partial summary judgment.

Disposition

The court’s conclusion states that Defendants’ motion to compel Dumbo’s trade-secret identification, or alternatively for partial summary judgment, was denied without prejudice. The parties were directed to appear for a status conference on January 29, 2025, and the clerk was directed to terminate the motion.