Businesses often need protection from the damage that may be caused by breaches by directors/employees of restrictive covenants, duties of confidentiality and fiduciary duties. Those rogue directors/employees may be seeking to divert business opportunities or otherwise gain an unfair competitive advantage. Competitors may also be engaged in unlawful practices to gain market share at the expense of the client or even to misappropriate the client’s business.
The damage to a business can be severe and the threat may even be existential. Proprietary and confidential information, such as client lists, product innovation and trade secrets may have significant value and form a fundamental part of the assets of a business. The threat requires quick and decisive action to preserve and protect the value of the business. This is why clients turn to PCB Byrne with its experience in obtaining and responding to injunctive relief, and in progressing cases to expedited trials.
Notable Experience
- Representing a large food supplier to the retail market in commencing proceedings in the High Court and successfully obtaining interim injunctive relief against a team of former employees and a competing business to prevent the use of unlawfully obtained confidential information in connection with and to preserve the value in a portfolio of newly designed range of products for the ambient food market immediately prior to its launch.
- Acting for a SME in the renewable energy sector in connection with interim injunctive relief obtained by the former employer of an employee that operates in the same sector to restrict and prevent the client and employee from using a confidential piece of software which the former employer claimed to have developed and had significant value.
- Acting as a court appointed independent solicitor in the oversight of the deletion from personal electronic devices of the claimant’s proprietary and confidential information unlawfully obtained by a former employee.
- Acting for the former director of a Middle Eastern bank, in obtaining the discharge of injunctive relief and then defeating at trial a US$1bn claim arising from alleged misappropriation of confidential information and the publication of allegations of improper lending by the bank.
- Acting for an insurance company in a series of claims against various businesses alleged to have targeted customers to deceive them into moving their cover.
- Acting for a media company in stopping serious allegations of wrongdoing being circulated on social media, thought to have been linked to a dispute with former employees who had set up a rival business.
- Acting for the director of a company in the entertainment industry in successfully warding off claims by the company for setting up and diverting potential business to another company.
- Acting in a dispute where the holding company of a group of businesses in the leisure and retail sector was subject of allegedly false filings at Companies House in order to take control of the holding company and its underlying businesses.