Intellectual Property & Technology Blog

AI already cost your company one form of protection over employee work product. Weak governance can cost you the second.

In January 2026, a federal court in the Northern District of California threw out a trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI. The plaintiff, Rebecca Trinidad, claimed she had developed proprietary frameworks for “emergent identity” and “autonomous multi-agent collaboration,” and that OpenAI had misappropriated them. The court didn’t need to decide whether her ideas had value. It dismissed her Defend Trade Secrets Act claim with prejudice for a simpler ...