## Facts

- Lowndes Products, Inc. manufactured nonwoven textile fabric using fibers formed into a web, bonded with latex, and dried into finished fabric.
- Lowndes experienced significant commercial success, with annual sales around $10 million at the time of suit.
- Several key employees left Lowndes and, with outside financial backing, organized B.L.S. Corporation to manufacture nonwoven fabric in competition with Lowndes; additional key employees later joined the new company.
- Lowndes alleged the defendants organized the competitor to exploit Lowndes’s manufacturing methods, customer-related information, and other confidential materials, and that they induced a coordinated departure of employees and removed company records.
- No patents, copyrights, confidentiality agreements, noncompetition covenants, or fixed-term employment contracts governed the parties’ relationship.
- Lowndes sought an injunction to prevent use of alleged trade secrets and sought damages for misappropriation and alleged disloyal conduct by certain employees.

## Issues

1. Whether Lowndes’s processes, methods, and related business information were protectable trade secrets, and whether defendants misappropriated them.
2. Whether former key employees breached a duty of loyalty by planning and launching a competing business, recruiting coworkers, and allegedly taking or using confidential information, absent contractual restrictions.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court of South Carolina affirmed the trial court’s denial of injunctive relief and damages.
- The court agreed Lowndes failed to show it took sufficient measures to keep the asserted information secret; therefore, the claimed processes were not legally protected trade secrets.
- In the absence of enforceable secrecy or noncompetition obligations, defendants were not liable merely for leaving and competing, including using general skill and knowledge gained during employment.
- The court found no reversible error in the trial court’s rejection of damages claims based on alleged disloyalty, given the factual findings and lack of protected trade secrets.

## Legal Principles

- Information is not treated as a trade secret unless the owner uses reasonable measures to maintain its secrecy; value or technical sophistication alone is insufficient.
- Absent noncompetition or confidentiality agreements, employees may leave and compete with a former employer and may use general knowledge, skill, and experience acquired in prior employment.
- An employee’s duty of loyalty during employment does not, without more, convert plans for future competition into liability; actionable conduct generally requires misuse of protected confidential information or violation of an enforceable contractual duty.

## Conclusion

The court upheld the denial of an injunction and damages because Lowndes did not adequately protect the claimed confidential information as a trade secret and had no contractual restraints on competition, leaving former employees free to compete using their general know-how.


Lowndes Prods., Inc. v. Brower, 191 S.E.2d 761 (S.C. 1972)