The Ownership Brief
The Clock You Did Not Know Was Running
A jury awarded $452 million. A judge reduced it to $59.4 million. Then the Federal Circuit reversed liability entirely, because the claim was brought too late.
Published August 5, 2026 · By Aurelia Mitchell Durant
The case involved Insulet and EOFlow, two companies in the insulin pump space. Insulet claimed that former employees took confidential information and used it to help build a competing product.
In December 2024, a jury agreed that trade secrets had been misappropriated. The damages figure was substantial, then reduced, and the case looked like a significant win for the party whose information had been taken.
On appeal, in May 2026, a divided panel of the Federal Circuit found that Insulet knew, or should have known, enough to bring its claim years earlier. By the time suit was filed, the three-year period under the Defend Trade Secrets Act had already run.
The misappropriation finding did not survive the timing problem.
Why this is different
Two ways to lose a trade secret
Most business owners think about trade secret risk in one direction: someone takes what you built. That is the obvious exposure and the one people plan for, to the extent they plan at all.
The second exposure is quieter. You may lose the ability to act because you waited too long after you had enough information to know there was a problem. The asset was real, the taking was real, and the remedy was still unavailable.
That is a harder loss to accept, because nothing about it was inevitable.
Most founders and business owners hold material that qualifies. Proprietary processes and methods. Client lists. Formulas. Systems. Training materials. Product roadmaps. Internal know-how that represents a genuine competitive advantage.
What is usually missing is the surrounding structure. The trade secret has not been clearly identified in writing. Access has not been limited. The agreements are generic or absent. There is no defined process for what happens when someone with access leaves.
And there is often no awareness at all of when a limitations clock might begin to run.
Sources and further reading
The Ownership Layer
The painful cases are not always the ones where there was nothing to protect. They are often the ones where there was something valuable to protect, and no one moved in time.
If your business depends on confidential information, the moment to determine whether it is actually protected is not after a dispute begins. By then the relevant questions are about what you did beforehand.