Our year-end countdown the year’s top 10 labor and employment law stories continues with numbers 6 and 5:
6. The Ohio Supreme Court holds that retained memories can qualify as trade secrets: In Al Minor & Assocs. v. Martin, the Ohio Supreme Court held that a customer list compiled by a former employee strictly from retained memory can form the basis for a statutory trade secret violation. According to the Court, information that constitutes a trade secret does not lose its character by being recreated from memory. In doing so, it not only greatly expanded the scope of statutory trade secret claims, but also expanded the class of employees against whom a non-competition agreement can be held to be enforceable.
5. The Ohio Healthy Families Act crashes and burns as its supporters pull it off the November ballot: The Ohio Healthy Families Act, if passed, would have provided 7 annual days of paid sick leave to employees of all Ohio employers with 25 or more employees. Thanks to an 11th hour compromise struck by Gov. Strickland and Sen. Brown, the SIEU agreed to remove this measure from November’s ballot. Had this measure been on the ballot, it would have likely passed, making Ohio the first state to mandate such a paid benefit. The last thing Ohio’s economy needs is a disincentive for businesses to call our state home. Thankfully, common sense prevailed.