Trade Secrets & Employee Mobility

For some time, the media has covered the prosecution of a former Citadel, LLC employee, Yihao Pu, for allegedly stealing Citadel’s trade secrets. The recent guilty plea of another Citadel LLC employee, Sahil Uppal, highlights the potential consequences of complicity in trade secrets theft.

In his plea deal earlier this month, Uppal admitted that he transferred Citadel’s intellectual property (consisting of computer code) to Pu without Citadel’s authorization or approval. Additionally, Uppal admitted that, after he learned that Citadel representatives had confronted ...

U.S. v. Pu presents another instance of a trade secret theft case with an international component that the federal authorities have decided to prosecute.