Richard Raysman and Peter Brown
On July 31, 2018, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan issued a decision in BullsEye Telecom v. BroadSoft, No. 2:18-cv-10195-VAR-RSW, 2018 WL 3631586 (E.D. Mich. July 31, 2018). The case concerned a dispute over whether a licensor of telecommunications software could compete with the licensee’s customers for the same services. Applying New York law as required by the license’s forum selection clause, the court first held that the licensee/plaintiff could not allege that defendant/licensor breached the license on these grounds because the license included no provision prohibiting solicitation of licensee’s end users. However, the court refused to dismiss plaintiff/licensee’s tort claim alleging tortious interference with economic expectancy, as it sufficiently pleaded evidence that defendant/licensor had deployed the licensee’s confidential pricing information, deemed a trade secret, to submit the lowest possible bid to the third party and thereby acquire the business.
A further discussion of the facts, procedural history and legal analysis and conclusions is below.
