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Federal trade secret litigation is evolving fast. Claimants filed more than 1,500 such lawsuits in 2025, marking a new single-year record. During a recent Lex Machina webcast, a panel of leading practitioners unpacked what has driven the recent acceleration in filings, how claims are being litigated, and what companies and counsel should expect in the years ahead.
The discussion brought together data-driven insights from Lex Machina with real-world experience from leading trade secret practitioners. Di Rivera of Lex Machina met with Tom Hubert and Jacob Pritt, lawyers with Jones Walker, along with Preston Satchell, content manager and editor for employment law from LexisNexis® Practical Guidance.
Watch the full recording after registering, and visit the report page to request your copy of the Lex Machina 2026 Trade Secret Litigation Report.
After a dip during the pandemic, federal trade secret litigation rebounded sharply, with filings in 2025 climbing roughly 20 percent year over year.
“I’ve only seen this area of the law continue to grow as long as I’ve been practicing, and certainly showing no signs of slowing down,” said Jacob Pritt. “When I started practicing, I was shocked by the sheer amount of people . . . taking information and going down the street to work for a competitor. We see it over and over again. Companies are wising up to it and coming up with ways to protect their information, so we expect this area of the law to continue to grow.”
“Damage models under DTSA cases have become much more well developed,” said Tom Hubert. “The rewards have gotten very large,” thereby encouraging litigation. For example, in May 2025, a jury in the Eastern District of Arkansas awarded over $200 million in damages to Zest Labs, Inc. in a trade-secret dispute against Walmart.
Recent trade-secret litigation in the field of artificial intelligence has also “exploded”, contributing to the overall increase, said Hubert. Noteworthy examples include X.AI v. OpenAI, Inc. et al in the Northern District of California.
One surprising takeaway from the Lex Machina data is the renewed life of non-DTSA claims in federal court. Rivera explained that while state-law trade secret claims declined steadily after DTSA’s enactment, that trend reversed beginning in 2024.
“In other words, reports of the demise of non-DTSA lawsuits may have been exaggerated,” Rivera said.
Panelists noted several factors behind the increase in claims brought under state law, including regulatory uncertainty around non-compete agreements and higher standards for preliminary injunctions under DTSA.
“Across the federal courts, they’re requiring [plaintiff-companies] to identify the actual trade secret that was stolen early in the litigation,” said Tom Hubert. That may encourage companies who cannot yet identify the stolen secrets to pursue claims in state courts, where they may have more time and leeway to conduct discovery and forensic analysis to identify the precise secrets alleged to have been stolen.
Another theme that emerged from the webinar is the complex and emotionally charged nature of trade secret litigation.
“Emotions run very high in these cases. No one likes to have their information stolen from them and used against them,” said Tom Hubert. “They’re very complicated cases. Forensics companies come in, conduct imaging, find out how information was taken, where it went, and try to help get it back.”
Also, trade secret allegations frequently appear alongside other causes of action. “Claims for trade secret litigation rarely come in a vacuum,” noted Di Rivera. “They often show up and play a major co-starring role with other causes of action, such as infringement of other intellectual property rights, breach of employment-related agreements, or violations of statutory employment protections.”
Despite the complexity of factual and legal issues involved, parties and their counsel must conduct thorough discovery and forensic analysis at breakneck speed to prepare for preliminary injunction hearings.
“An injunction hearing is basically a trial,” said Jacob Pritt. “Most judges will take live testimony from your key witnesses, conduct a credibility determination, and see if they believe if any info has been stolen.” In effect, this means that before the injunction hearing takes place, there is a “race to conduct sufficient discovery, do preliminary forensics on devices and accounts, take depositions,” and more, all in a matter of weeks.
From a practitioner’s perspective, Preston Satchell emphasized the growing demand for practical, jurisdiction-specific resources. Satchell highlighted Lexis Practical Guidance resources covering state-specific trade secret laws, non-compete rules, and best practices for seeking temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions.
“Our customers have emphasized the need for practical, litigation-ready analysis addressing employee mobility,” said Preston Satchell. Practical Guidance resources curated for “the use of artificial intelligence and digital forensics in trade secrets disputes have been very popular with our customers.”
“Outside the DTSA, there’s also strong demand for jurisdiction-specific guidance,” Satchell continued, noting that Lexis Practical Guidance contains dynamic state-specific analysis for non-compete agreements and trade secrets throughout the country.
Especially helpful resources for Practical Guidance subscribers include:
With filing volumes rising, procedural complexity increasing, and appellate reversal rates exceeding the civil litigation average, data-driven insight for trade secret litigation has never been more important.
The Lex Machina platform is built on comprehensive information derived from court filings that has been carefully cleaned, tagged, and normalized through a unique combination of artificial intelligence and manual review by subject-matter experts. By extracting key details like motion outcomes, trial verdicts, damage awards, and the attorneys involved, the platform transforms raw court records into structured insights for commercially relevant cases across federal courts and an expanding range of state courts – now including docket-level data for more than 1,300 venues. With the industry’s most comprehensive and powerful litigation dataset, Lex Machina enables companies and law firms to make data-empowered decisions for case strategy and business development.
With our Litigation Report series, Lex Machina remains the only Legal Analytics® platform offering regularly published editorial analyses of emerging litigation trends. Drawing on exclusive insights from the lawyers and data scientists behind the platform, these reports equip legal and risk professionals with actionable intelligence for effective claim assessment and dispute resolution in the 2020s.
To learn more and see the analytics in action, visit LexisNexis.com/LexMachina.