Many of the investments that we make at Lake Whillans involve supporting innovators and entrepreneurs who are seeking to protect trade secrets. We have found this group to be particularly vulnerable to more well-heeled competitors seeking to gain an unfair advantage in the market place. Naturally, we were curious about the new rights enacted by Congress in the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016. We turned to Jonathan Patchen and Max Twine of Taylor & Company Law Offices, LLP, named to our recently published list of the White Sandal Elite: The Go-To Law Firm Firms of the Silicon Valley, to educate us and ATL readers on the basics of the new legislation:

I’ve definitely been involved in situations where new approaches, and particularly litigation finance, would have helped to level the playing field against a well-resourced opponent. Without getting into specifics, our firm has represented bankruptcy estates where a major asset was a litigation against well-heeled defendants. A significant part of the defendants’ litigation strategy was a scorched-earth tactic designed to prolong the litigation, with the knowledge that the bankruptcy estate had a finite and shrinking pool of funds, to pressure the bankruptcy estates and creditors to accept a less attractive settlement of meritorious claims. Litigation funding could certainly have helped to shift the leverage and not allow the costs of litigation to become a barrier to obtaining the right result.