Florida Court to Consider if Customer Orders Are Trade Secrets

Florida businesses seeking to crack-down on competition got a boost Wednesday when an appeals court said companies’ customer order information could qualify as protected trade secrets.

The state’s 4th District Court of Appeals said that Patient Depot, a broker of personal protective equipment, or PPE, could bring claims that its trade secrets were misappropriated by a former contractor who used its customer order information to start a competing business in the fall of 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The lower court previously ruled that Patient Depot’s customer information was public and easily found on the internet. But ...