A couple of weeks back a team of intellectual property litigators at Latham & Watkins led by David Callahan and Bert Reiser landed Litigator of the Week runners-up honors after getting a big trade secret ruling for electric car battery maker LG Energy Solutions at the U.S. International Trade Commission. In a case where the company accused rival SK Innovation of trade secret misappropriation, the full commission largely upheld an administrative law judge’s default judgment against SK last month based on the South Korean company’s “document deletion campaign” in the runup to the ITC investigation. Under the ruling SK has to go back to the Commission for sign-off on any “designed-around” products.

The battery brouhaha is hardly the only trade secret showdown currently playing out before the ITC, where fast-paced Section 337 proceedings are much more common in patent cases. Of late the ITC has overseen trade secrets disputes concerning certain Botox products and certain bone cements, the stuff used to fill gaps between artificial joints and bones. The Litigation Daily caught up with Callahan, global chair of Latham’s IP practice and Reiser, who heads the firm’s ITC litigation practice to see what’s behind the uptick in trade secret action at the venue and what it means for litigators handling them. The following has been edited for length and clarity.