Chicago Business Litigation Lawyer Blog
When a high-level employee left Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) to start his own consultancy company, ADM filed suit against the former employee alleging that his new business violated the non-disclosure agreement he signed. A trial court sided with ADM and enjoined the former employee from engaging in consultancy activities. In a case recently added to the official reports, an Illinois appellate court reversed finding that ADM failed to establish a likelihood of success on its claim that the former employee’s activities would violate the NDA he signed.
Lane Sinele worked at ADM for 28 years. At the time he left, he was the manager of national accounts for ADM’s sweetener division. In that position, he represented ADM soliciting, procuring, and servicing buyers of sweeteners. While employed by ADM, Sinele had access to ADM’s Tableau database, a customer profitability database, which contained information about freight systems, manufacturing costs by facility, individual customers’ procurements of corn, manufacturing costs of the corn products, customers’ margins, and margins by location. ADM considered the information contained in its Tableau database to be trade secrets. To maintain their secrecy, ADM limited access to the database to salespeople, like Sinele, and then only for those customers for which that salesperson had responsibility.
In 2018, Sinele left ADM and formed his own consultancy business in which he planned to act as an agent of sweetener buyers in their negotiations with the five major sweetener manufacturers, of whom ADM is one. Shortly after leaving ADM, Sinele sent an email to his former boss requesting a meeting with ADM to negotiate on behalf of two of Sinele’s clients who happened to be ADM customers whose accounts Sinele handled while at ADM. ADM responded by filing suit against Sinele shortly thereafter. Continue reading ›