Scott McDonald‘s client Quantlab took a rough road to protect its trade secrets, spending years in litigation in a case that involved wide-ranging destruction of evidence and an FBI investigation before winning a $12.2 million verdict from a Houston federal jury.
But after defendants appealed the award by questioning whether the high-frequency automated financial trading company proved it even had a trade secret, McDonald convinced the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that Quantlab deserved to keep every cent of the jury’s verdict. That ruling came June 22.
