Nikhil Pradhan Explores Jury Perceptions of AI in Trade Secret Disputes

Foley & Lardner LLP senior counsel Nikhil Pradhan examined the impact of AI in trade secret cases in the Law360 article, “Will Jurors Penalize AI? Study Examines Trade Secrets Impact.”

Pradhan assessed a new study which presented mock jurors with a trade secrets case involving bot-driven data scraping, modeled after the Eleventh Circuit’s 2024 ruling in Compulife Software Inc. v. Newman.

“In the study, they really are controlling down to just simply identical conduct and whether it gets labeled as AI or not,” Pradhan explained. “But I just wonder if that’s really something that can be teased apart so neatly.”

He added that the study’s finding may instead be reflecting broader anxiety about automation rather than direct bias against AI. “Compulife itself focuses on the idea of a person manually asking for like 10 of these quotes versus a bot retrieving a million, so there’s probably an intent aspect in there, too,” he continued. “If a person is themselves filling out a form on a website 10 times, they’re not actually attempting to misappropriate.”

“People are still trying to figure out what’s the next layer of protection and how that maps to where case law is going,” he concluded, noting uncertainty around AI is shifting how attorneys consider trade secret protection strategies.

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