Bosch Sues to Prevent ex-Manager From Sharing Its Trade Secrets With Riedel

When Martinus van Geel resigned from Bosch Security Systems as “a trusted and high-level manager” in its critical communications sector to go to work for Riedel Communications, its “primary competitor,” he took many of Bosch’s trade secrets with him, alleged Bosch’s Defense of Trade Secrets Act complaint Tuesday (docket 0:24-cv-02315) in U.S. District Court for Minnesota. Van Geel’s primary job duty at Bosch “was to plan, develop and execute Bosch’s strategies to compete with, and succeed against, Riedel” on a worldwide basis, said the complaint. In preparation for taking employment with Riedel, van Geel copied “massive amounts of trade secret and highly proprietary Bosch information” to removable storage devices, “in clear violation of the duties he owes Bosch,” it said. Van Geel kept the most proprietary files and information that he worked on only on his company-issued laptop and without putting those materials onto the plaintiff’s servers, it said. Yet when he turned in his company laptop the day after he announced he was leaving Bosch to join Riedel and to compete against the plaintiff, van Geel had apparently deleted all of Bosch’s proprietary files from his laptop, along with most of the contents of his Bosch email account and all information from his company-issued cellphone, it said. When Bosch recently demanded that the defendant return all information and the removable drives he used to copy Bosch’s propriety information, he provided only some of the drives, and from those, he apparently had deleted the sensitive files he had stolen, said the complaint. The plaintiff seeks to enjoin van Geel “from using or benefitting from the information he stole from Bosch,” it said. It also seeks to disgorge him of any compensation he received while in breach of his duties, it said. Bosch also seeks to recover damages caused by van Geel’s improper actions, including the costs of the company’s investigation into his wrongdoing, plus the costs to recover the stolen or deleted information, it said.