## Facts

- Rivendell Forest Products, Ltd. operated as a lumber “reload wholesaler,” buying milled lumber and distributing it through multiple leased yards.
- Rivendell used a computer-based price-quoting tool (“Quote Screen”) that integrated lumber specifications, location, freight charges, credit information, and inventory (including in-transit inventory) to generate immediate customer quotes.
- Rivendell asserted the Quote Screen produced large efficiency gains and a competitive advantage over competitors using manual calculations.
- Rivendell sought to keep its methods confidential by requiring employee confidentiality agreements and instructing employees that its business practices were trade secrets.
- Timothy L. Cornwell worked for Rivendell (1987–1990), supervised employees using the Quote Screen, and left without having developed the program’s software.
- Cornwell later became marketing manager for Canadian lumber at Georgia-Pacific’s distribution division.
- Georgia-Pacific developed a “Quick Quote” system that Rivendell claimed was functionally identical to the Quote Screen, but there was no evidence of copying Rivendell’s source code.
- Rivendell sued Georgia-Pacific and Cornwell for trade secret misappropriation and related claims; both sides moved for summary judgment.

## Issues

1. Whether Rivendell’s Quote Screen system and related methods constituted protectable trade secrets.
2. Whether Rivendell produced sufficient evidence that Georgia-Pacific and Cornwell misappropriated those alleged trade secrets.
3. Whether, absent a protectable trade secret, Rivendell’s related claims (including contract-based and interference theories) could survive summary judgment.

## Decision

- The court granted defendants’ motion for summary judgment and denied Rivendell’s cross-motion.
- The court held Rivendell failed, as a matter of law, to establish the existence of a protectable trade secret in the Quote Screen system and its underlying concepts.
- Because no protectable trade secret was shown, Rivendell could not proceed on misappropriation or related claims on the summary-judgment record.

## Legal Principles

- To qualify as a trade secret, information must be sufficiently secret (not generally known or readily ascertainable), provide a competitive advantage, and be subject to reasonable efforts to maintain secrecy.
- Combining known data inputs and business practices may be insufficient to establish a trade secret where the claimed “concepts and principles” are considered public or obvious rather than secret information.
- Confidentiality agreements and internal directives, standing alone, do not convert non-secret concepts into trade secrets.
- Functional similarity between competing systems, without evidence of appropriation of protectable secret material (such as copied code or other specific secret expression), may be inadequate to create a triable misappropriation claim.
- Summary judgment is appropriate when the nonmovant fails to show a genuine dispute of material fact on an essential element, including the existence of a protectable trade secret.

## Conclusion

The court resolved the case on summary judgment for Georgia-Pacific and Cornwell, concluding that Rivendell did not identify a legally protectable trade secret in its integrated price-quoting system and that similarity between the parties’ quoting tools did not, without proof of appropriation of secret material, support misappropriation or related claims.


Rivendell Forest Prods., Ltd. v. Georgia-Pacific Corp., 824 F. Supp. 961 (D. Colo. 1993)